Corrected Measures for Patent Citation Analysis: Accounting for Published Patent Applications
8 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2019 Last revised: 11 Jan 2020
Date Written: July 29, 2019
Abstract
This article investigates patent citations made to published patent applications. Although citations to patent publications are conceptually indistinguishable from citations to granted patents, they are omitted from all standard measures. We find that publication citations are a large and growing portion of patent citations, and that they differ statistically from citations to granted patents on several important dimensions. We conclude that omitting publication citations is likely to generate biased measures, and that standard measures of patent citations should be corrected. We release our computer code and corrections for future use.
Keywords: patent citations, patent publications, measure construction, measure bias
JEL Classification: O30, O31, O34, K11, C81
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation