Community structure in co-inventor networks affects time to first citation for patents

Applied Network Science

Ulrich Zülicke¹  Michele Governale¹  William Doonan¹  Kyle W. Higham¹ 

[1] Te Pūnaha Matatini, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington;

关键词: Patent citations;    Community detection;    Knowledge propagation;   

DOI  :  10.1007/s41109-019-0126-3

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Abstract We have investigated community structure in the co-inventor network of a given cohort of patents and related this structure to the dynamics of how these patents acquire their first citation. A statistically significant difference in the time lag until first citation is linked to whether or not this citation comes from a patent whose listed inventors share membership in the same communities as the inventors of the cited patent. Although the inventor-community structures identified by different community-detection algorithms differ in several aspects, including the community-size distribution, the magnitude of the difference in time to first citation is robustly exhibited. Our work is able to quantify the expected acceleration of knowledge flow within inventor communities and thereby further establishes the utility of network-analysis tools for studying innovation dynamics.

【 授权许可】

Unknown