Patent Citations as a Measure of Knowledge Flows: The Influence of Examiner Citations

By Juan Alcácer, Michelle Gittelman. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2006

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/724dba8e245ef011050a4114b9059ab7242611a0

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Citations in the corpus

The Antecedents and Innovation Consequences of Organizational Knowledge Brokering Capability (2007, neutral): “Alcacer and Gittelman ( 2006 ) argue that patent examiner - imposed citations may be an important phenomenon .”
How do spatial and social proximity influence knowledge flows? Evidence from patent data (2008, background): “Some citations are supplied by the applicant, others by the patent examiner (Alcacer and Gittelman, 2006; Hegde and Sampat, 2007), and some patents may be cited more frequently than others because they are more salient in terms of satisfying legal definitions of prior art rather than because they…”
Asymmetry of knowledge spillovers between MNCs and host country firms (2007, background): “A specific issue is that patent examiners insert a significant fraction of citations, with these examiner-added citations being systematically less likely to represent true knowledge flows (Alcacer and Gittelman, 2006; Thompson, 2006).”
Technological exploration through licensing: new insights from the licensee’s point of view (2010, background): “Recent studies have found that also in the USPTO about 40% of citations are added by patent examiners (Alcácer and Gittelman, 2006).”
Knowledge Maturity and the Scientific Value of Innovations (2017, background): “Although patent citations enable the tracking of knowledge flows among innovations, several citations are often added by examiners and thus may not reflect an actual knowledge flow (Alcacer & Gittelman, 2006).”
Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge (2011, neutral): “Researchers have also measured knowledge by assessing characteristics of organization's products or services (Helfat & Raubitschek, 2000) or its patent stock (Alcacer & Gittleman, 2006).”
Keep searching and you’ll find: what do we know about variety creation through firms’ search activities for innovation? (2012, background): “Using patent-citations introduces a methodological problem related to the fact that inventors may not be familiar with the patent and scientific publications cited in their patents, because patent examiners are responsible for 63% of the citations in an average patent (Alcácer and Gittelman, 2006).”
Do Important Inventions Benefit from Knowledge Originating in Other Technological Domains (2012, background): “Similarly, even though many of these citations are added by examiners (Alcacer and Gittelman, 2006), there is evidence that these additions enhance the picture of whence knowledge derives, as it corrects for incentives to ignore potentially overlapping prior art (Criscuolo and Verspagen, 2008; Schoe”
Technological change, rent and income inequalities: A Schumpeterian approach (2017, background): “Accordingly, patents have been extensively used in the management and economics literature to measure knowledge flows (e.g., Griliches, 1990; Jaffe et al., 1993 and 1998; Almeida and Kogut, 1999; Popp, 2003 and 2005; Alcacer and Gittelman, 2006).”
Relatedness, external linkages and regional innovation in Europe (2018, neutral): “Even though the use of patent citations does not come without limitations – e.g., some citations are added by the examiner, and not the applicant (Alcacer and Gittelman, 2006), they have been widely used in innovation economics as a proxy for knowledge flows (Criscuolo and Verspagen, 2008; Jaffe et…”
Is firm-specific innovation associated with greater value appropriation? The roles of environmental dynamism and technological diversity (2010, background): “However, inferences about inventor knowledge using pooled citations may suffer from bias or overinflated significance levels (Alcacer and Gittelman, 2006).”
Brain drain or brain bank? The impact of skilled emigration on poor-country innovation (2008, background): “Yet the applicant does not supply all citations ; some are added by the patent examiner ( Alcacer and Gittelman , 2006 ; Hegde and Sampat , 2007 ) .”
Patent citation data in social science research: Overview and best practices (2017, neutral): “In a similar vein, Alc acer and Gittelman (2006) estimate the probability that a citation is generated by an examiner or an inventor, conditional on a set of variables that are frequently employed in the knowledge spillover literature. They find that examiner citations introduce bias for some variab”