The Missing 15 Percent of Patent Citations

61 Pages Posted: 5 Jan 2021

See all articles by Cyril Verluise

Cyril Verluise

Paris School of Economics (PSE); Collège de France

Gabriele Cristelli

Stanford University

Kyle Higham

Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Gaétan de Rassenfosse

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Date Written: December 2020

Abstract

Patent citations are one of the most commonly-used metrics in the innovation literature. Leading uses of patent-to-patent citations are associated with the quantification of inventions’ quality and the measurement of knowledge flows. Due to their widespread availability, scholars have exploited citations listed on the front-page of patent documents. Citations appearing in the full-text of patent documents have been neglected. We apply modern machine learning methods to extract these citations from the text of USPTO patent documents. Overall, we are able to recover an additional 15 percent of patent citations that could not be found using only front-page data. We show that 'in-text' citations bring a different type of information compared to front-page citations. They exhibit higher text-similarity to the citing patents and alter the ranking of patent importance.

Keywords: Citation, Patent, Open data

JEL Classification: C81, O30

Suggested Citation

Verluise, Cyril and Cristelli, Gabriele and Higham, Kyle and de Rassenfosse, Gaétan, The Missing 15 Percent of Patent Citations (December 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3754772 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3754772

Cyril Verluise

Paris School of Economics (PSE) ( email )

48 Boulevard Jourdan
Paris, 75014 75014
France

Collège de France ( email )

11 Place Marcelin Berthelot
Paris, 75231
France

Gabriele Cristelli

Stanford University ( email )

269 Campus Dr.

Kyle Higham

Motu Economic and Public Policy Research ( email )

Level 1, 93 Cuba Street
P.O. Box 24390
Wellington, 6142
New Zealand

Gaétan De Rassenfosse (Contact Author)

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) ( email )

Station 5
Odyssea 1.04
1015 Lausanne, CH-1015
Switzerland

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