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Reliance on science: Worldwide front‐page patent citations to scientific articles

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  • Matt Marx
  • Aaron Fuegi

Abstract

Research summary To what extent do firms rely on basic science in their R&D efforts? Several scholars have sought to answer this and related questions, but progress has been impeded by the difficulty of matching unstructured references in patents to published papers. We introduce an open‐access dataset of references from the front pages of patents granted worldwide to scientific papers published since 1800. Each patent‐paper linkage is assigned a confidence score, which is characterized in a random sample by false negatives versus false positives. All matches are available for download at http://relianceonscience.org. We outline several avenues for strategy research enabled by these new data. Managerial summary To what extent do firms rely on basic science in their R&D efforts? Several scholars have sought to answer this and related questions, but progress has been impeded by the difficulty of matching unstructured references in patents to published papers. We introduce an open‐access dataset of references from the front pages of patents granted worldwide to scientific papers published since 1800. Each patent‐paper linkage is assigned a confidence score, and we check a random sample of these confidence scores by hand in order to estimate both coverage (i.e., of the matches we should have found, what percentage did we find) and accuracy (i.e., of the matches we found, what percentage are correct). We outline several avenues for strategy research enabled by these new data.

Suggested Citation

  • Matt Marx & Aaron Fuegi, 2020. "Reliance on science: Worldwide front‐page patent citations to scientific articles," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(9), pages 1572-1594, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:stratm:v:41:y:2020:i:9:p:1572-1594
    DOI: 10.1002/smj.3145
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