Patent citation inflation: The phenomenon, its measurement, and relative indicators to temper its effects

作者：

Highlights：

• Patent citation inflation has occurred frequently over the past four decades – in some cases at very high levels.

• A deep exploration of the phenomena of citation inflation using USPTO patents as a corpus is conducted.

• Appropriate methods for measuring the impact of two types of patent citation inflation are proposed.

• Several relative indicators that more accurately reflect the worth of citation counts by properly accounting for inflation are developed.

摘要

•Patent citation inflation has occurred frequently over the past four decades – in some cases at very high levels.•A deep exploration of the phenomena of citation inflation using USPTO patents as a corpus is conducted.•Appropriate methods for measuring the impact of two types of patent citation inflation are proposed.•Several relative indicators that more accurately reflect the worth of citation counts by properly accounting for inflation are developed.

论文关键词：Citation inflation,Patent obsolescence,Relative citation indicator,Reference share,Research evaluation

论文评审过程：Received 30 November 2018, Revised 16 January 2020, Accepted 17 January 2020, Available online 5 February 2020, Version of Record 5 February 2020.

论文官网地址：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101015