Volume 51, Issue 1 p. 109-132
Original Article

Patent citations reexamined

Jeffrey Kuhn

Corresponding Author

Jeffrey Kuhn

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Corresponding author. Jeffrey Kuhn jeffrey_kuhn@kenan-flagler.unc.edu.Search for more papers by this author
Kenneth Younge

Kenneth Younge

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Search for more papers by this author
Alan Marco
First published: 05 March 2020
Citations: 88

We thank Ian Cockburn, Rui de Figueiredo, Jeff Furman, Michelle Gittelman, Dietmar Harhoff, Robert Merges, Michael Meurer, Atul Nerkar, Gaetan de Rassenfosse, Katja Seim, Tim Simcoe, Neil Thompson, Tony Tong, Andrew Toole, Brian Wright, Noam Yuchtman, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. We also thank seminar participants at the 2016 Searle Center Conference on Innovation Economics, the 2017 Boston University Law Schools Technology Policy and Research Initiative Conference, the 2016 Munich Summer Institute, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (2015), Skema Business School (2015), the 2016 DRUID Conference, and the 2016 Academy of Management Annual Meeting. The authors thank the United States Patent and Trademark Office for providing access to data. The authors also thank Google for a generous research grant of computing time on the Google Cloud.

Abstract

Many studies rely on patent citations to measure intellectual heritage and impact. In this article, we show that the nature of patent citations has changed dramatically in recent years. Today, a small minority of patent applications are generating a large majority of patent citations, and the mean technological similarity between citing and cited patents has fallen considerably. We replicate several well-known studies in industrial organization and innovation economics and demonstrate how generalized assumptions about the nature of patent citations have misled the field.

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