Does involvement in patenting jeopardize one’s academic footprint? An analysis of patent-paper pairs in biotechnology

The question whether involvement in patenting hampers the dissemination of a scientist’s published research is a relevant and important one. To this end, a detailed, large-scale citation analysis of patent-paper pairs in biotechnology is conducted. Those pairs signal the occurrence of research resulting simultaneously in scientific publications and patent applications. Patent-paper pairs are detected using text-mining algorithms applied on a large dataset. Starting from a dataset consisting of 948,432 scientific publications and 88,248 EPO and USPTO patent documents, 584 patent-paper pairs are identified. The forward citation patterns of these patent-paper pairs are then matched and compared to biotechnology publications without an equivalent patent. Publications linked to a patent receive more citations than publications without a patent link (after taking into account the necessary controls). In addition, by comparing H-indexes, our findings reveal that the authors involved in such pairs develop a larger scientific footprint than comparable colleagues refraining from patent activity. We conclude that involvement in patenting does not hamper the dissemination of published research in the field of biotechnology.