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Inventor team size as a predictor of the future citation impact of patents

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Abstract

Forward citations are widely recognized as a useful measure of the impact of patents upon subsequent technological developments. However, an inherent characteristic of forward citations is that they take time to accumulate. This makes them valuable for retrospective impact evaluations, but less helpful for prospective forecasting exercises. To overcome this, it would be desirable to have indicators that forecast future citations at the time a patent is issued. In this paper, we outline one such indicator, based on the size of the inventor teams associated with patents. We demonstrate that, on average, patents with eight or more co-inventors are cited significantly more frequently in their first 5 years than peer patents with fewer inventors. This result holds true across technologies, assignee type, citation source (examiner versus applicant), and after self-citations are accounted for. We hypothesize that inventor team size may be a reflection of the amount of resources committed by an organization to a given innovation, with more researchers attached to innovations regarded as having particular promise or value.

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Notes

  1. The Citation Index for a set of patents is calculated as the sum of all the forward citations to the set of patents divided by the sum of the expected citations for all of the patents in the set (where the expected citations consists of the average number of citations for patents in the same patent classification and issue year of the subject patent).

  2. The Citation Index is still valid despite the roll up of years and categories, because we have an expected number of forward citations for each patent depending on year and patent office classification. The Citation Index for a set is simply the sum of the citations for a very broad category divided by the sum of the expected citations for all the patents in that category.

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Acknowledgments

Supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of Interior National Business Center contract number D11PC20154. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. Disclaimer: The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, DoI/NBC, or the U.S. Government.

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Correspondence to Anthony Breitzman.

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Breitzman, A., Thomas, P. Inventor team size as a predictor of the future citation impact of patents. Scientometrics 103, 631–647 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1550-5

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