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The log-linear relation between patent citations and patent value

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Abstract

This paper reports the results of an analysis of patent citation and patent renewal data, advancing a log-linear relation between patent citations and patent value. A complementary analysis of firms’ patent portfolios confirms that modelling the relation between citations and firm value benefits from the adoption of the log-linear form.

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Notes

  1. This family groups patents from different offices that have an identical technical content (Albrecht et al. 2010).

  2. Applicants may come from countries with few patents, which would disrupt the analysis because the dummy variable relating to that country cannot be estimated (well). Therefore, applicant countries with less than 50 patents in the analyses have been grouped together in a separate category. This has affected 819 patents in total.

  3. A comparative analysis that included observations for firms with no patent stock as well as a dummy controlling for this occurrence yielded very similar results to the analyses presented in this paper.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Bart Van Looy, Otto Toivanen, Dirk Czarnitzki, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and invaluable support in completing this paper.

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Correspondence to Jurriën Bakker.

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Bakker, J. The log-linear relation between patent citations and patent value. Scientometrics 110, 879–892 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2208-7

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