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A Penny for Your Quotes: Patent Citations and the Value of Innovations
Abstract
The use of patents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value, and hence, simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output. The purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations, thereby overcoming the limitations of simple counts. The empirical analysis of a particular innovation (Computed Tomography scanners) indeed shows a close association between citation-based patent indices and independent measures of the social value of innovations in that field. Moreover, the weighting scheme appears to be nonlinear (increasing) in the number of citations, implying that the informational content of citations rises at the margin. As in previous studies, simple patent counts are found to be highly correlated with contemporaneous R&D; however, here the association is within a field over time rather than cross-sectional.
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Citations
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
Interorganizational Endorsements and the Performance of Entrepreneurial Ventures
Stuart, T. E., Hoang, H., & Hybels, R. C. (1999) · Administrative Science Quarterly · doi:10.2307/2666998 · Cited by 2,751
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
Aging, Obsolescence, and Organizational Innovation
Sørensen, J. B., & Stuart, T. E. (2000) · Administrative Science Quarterly · doi:10.2307/2666980 · Cited by 1,862
Technology as a complex adaptive system: evidence from patent data
Fleming, L., & Sorenson, O. (2001) · Research Policy · doi:10.1016/s0048-7333(00)00135-9 · Cited by 1,315
Metadata
- Authors
- Trajtenberg, M.
- Venue
- The RAND Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1990
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 172
- ISSN
- 0741-6261 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1976395435
- Cited by
- 2,956
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 9.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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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.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Penny for Your Quotes: Patent Citations and the Value of Innovations. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2555502
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- Trajtenberg, M. (1990). A Penny for Your Quotes: Patent Citations and the Value of Innovations. The RAND Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/2555502
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.
