Abstract
Patent citations have become an acceptable proxy for inventions’ quality. Our study offers the first systematic exploration of uncited patents. Analyzing data on all US patents issued between 1976 and 2008, we examine the ratio of uncited patents out of all patents granted each year. We find a robust pattern, consistent across technological fields, whereby the percentage of uncited patents declined between 1976 and the mid-1990s, but has been significantly increasing since then. We discuss policy implications of these findings and suggest that the ratio of uncited patents can serve as a complementary measure for evaluating the patent system.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 4 |
| Pages (from-to) | 2903-2929 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Scientometrics |
| Volume | 126 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are grateful to the two anonymous referees for extremely helpful suggestions and comments. For valuable comments and input we also thank Ronen Avraham, Eran Bareket, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Reuven Cohen, Rebecca Eisenberg, Roger Ford, Jeanne Fromer, Richard Gruner, Sharon Hausdoff, Dmitry Karshedt, Paul Kaye, Mark Lemley, Michael Livermore, David Schwartz, Ofer Tur-Sinai, Saurabh Vishnubhkat, and the participants of the European Law and Economics Association Conference (2019), the Data Science and Law Conference at Bar-Ilan University (2019), the WIPO Conference on Emerging Technologies (2019), and the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference at Stanford University (2020, Online). We are also grateful Andrew Toole for assistance in obtaining relevant data. Neil Gandal is very grateful for a grant from the Foerder Institute for Economic Research.
Funding Information:
We are grateful to the two anonymous referees for extremely helpful suggestions and comments. For valuable comments and input we also thank Ronen Avraham, Eran Bareket, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Reuven Cohen, Rebecca Eisenberg, Roger Ford, Jeanne Fromer, Richard Gruner, Sharon Hausdoff, Dmitry Karshedt, Paul Kaye, Mark Lemley, Michael Livermore, David Schwartz, Ofer Tur-Sinai, Saurabh Vishnubhkat, and the participants of the European Law and Economics Association Conference (2019), the Data Science and Law Conference at Bar-Ilan University (2019), the WIPO Conference on Emerging Technologies (2019), and the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference at Stanford University (2020, Online). We are also grateful Andrew Toole for assistance in obtaining relevant data. Neil Gandal is very grateful for a grant from the Foerder Institute for Economic Research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
Keywords
- Big data
- Innovation
- Negative knowledge
- Networks
- Patent citations
- Patent quality
- Patents
- Uncited patents