Prior art patent citations have become a popular measure of patent quality and knowledge flow between firms. Interpreting these measurements is complicated, in some cases, because prior art citations are added by patent examiners as well as by patent applicants. The U.S. Patent and Trademark...

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...

In this paper, we show that there are important differences across patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We show that more experienced examiners cite less prior art, are more likely to grant patents, and are more likely to grant patents without any rejections. These results...

Patent law both imposes a duty on patent applicants to submit relevant prior art to the PTO and assumes that examiners use this information to determine an application's patentability. In this paper, we examine the validity of these assumptions by studying the use made of applicant-submitted...

Examiner citations to a patent are stronger predictors than applicant citations of a widely used measure of patent value: whether a patent has been (or will be) renewed.

This study looks at the United States biotechnology industry as a community of practice caught between two evolutionary logics by which valuable scientific knowledge and valuable innovations are selected. We analyze the publications and patents of 116 biotechnology firms during the period...

[fre] Cet article se base sur les publications scientifiques d'un échantillon important d'entreprises de biotechnologies. Il étudie la relation entre les capacités de recherche privée et l'intensité des collaborations entre scientifiques privés et universitaires. L'étude présente des...