The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Patent Citations as a Measure of Knowledge Flows: The Influence of Examiner Citations
Abstract
Analysis of patent citations is a core methodology in the study of knowledge diffusion. However, citations made by patent examiners have not been separately reported, adding unknown noise to the data. We leverage a recent change in the reporting of patent data showing citations added by examiners. The magnitude is high: two-thirds of citations on the average patent are inserted by examiners. Furthermore, 40% of all patents have all citations added by examiners. We analyze the distribution of examiner and inventor citations with respect to self-citation, distance, technology overlap, and vintage. Results indicate that inferences about inventor knowledge using pooled citations may suffer from bias or overinflated significance levels.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Localization of Knowledge and the Mobility of Engineers in Regional Networks
Almeida, P., & Kogut, B. (1999) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.45.7.905 · Cited by 2,565
Cited by
The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge
Wuchty, S., Jones, B. F., & Uzzi, B. (2007) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1136099 · Cited by 3,615
Public R&D Investments and Private-sector Patenting: Evidence from NIH Funding Rules
Azoulay, P., Graff Zivin, J. S., Li, D., & Sampat, B. N. (2019) · The Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1093/restud/rdy034 · Cited by 349
Machine learning and human capital complementarities: Experimental evidence on bias mitigation
Choudhury, P., Starr, E., & Agarwal, R. (2020) · Strategic Management Journal · doi:10.1002/smj.3152 · Cited by 293
The applied value of public investments in biomedical research
Li, D., Azoulay, P., & Sampat, B. N. (2017) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aal0010 · Cited by 194
NK model as a representation of innovative search
Ganco, M. (2017) · Research Policy · doi:10.1016/j.respol.2017.08.009 · Cited by 83
Metadata
- Authors
- Alcácer, J., & Gittelman, M.
- Venue
- Review of Economics and Statistics
- Publisher
- MIT Press - Journals
- Published
- 2006-11
- Volume
- 88
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 774-779
- ISSN
- 0034-6535 (ISSN-L)
- 1530-9142
- OpenAlex
- W2157579402
- Cited by
- 766
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 49.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Patent Citations as a Measure of Knowledge Flows: The Influence of Examiner Citations. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1162/rest.88.4.774
- The paper
- Alcácer, J., & Gittelman, M. (2006). Patent Citations as a Measure of Knowledge Flows: The Influence of Examiner Citations. Review of Economics and Statistics. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.88.4.774
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
