Identification of university-based patents : a new large-scale approach

This paper described a method to consistently and automatically identify all university-based patents by matching the names of inventors on patent filings with authors of scientific publications. This methodological procedure can be adjusted for different pur-poses. Handling selection criteria rigorously allows us to generate a dataset of universi-ty-based patents with high precision. A less restrictive setting of selection criteria yields a higher coverage in terms of the overall picture and total numbers of academic pa-tents. Using the authors of scientific publications allows us to identify research-active staff at universities without having to continuously compile and update staff lists for comparison with inventor lists. In particular, the author lists also cover research-active staff without official teaching functions who are often not covered by the official staff lists.