The positive effect of academic invention and ownership on citations to scientific articles: universities vs public research organisations
Increasing pressure on public research for tangible impact focuses on academic invention effects on research quality and quantity, with an emphasis on citations as a measure of impact. Evidence suggests a positive relationship between academic inventors and increased research citations, with considerations for patented knowledge ownership and academic institutions. Explore the implications and nuances of academic invention on research impact.
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The positive effect of academic invention and ownership on citations to scientific articles: universities vs public research organisations Catalina Mart nez, CSIC-IPP with Joaqu n Azagra-Caro, INGENIO CSIC-UPV and St phane Maraut, Independent Researcher 10-11 May 2011 ESF-APE-INV workshop Scientists and Inventors KU Leuven
2 Motivation and objectives There is increasing pressure on public research systems to do research that is useful and has social and economic impact (preferably if impact is tangible and visible soon) Patents are seen as a measure of such impact, but academic researchers are still mainly evaluated on the amount and, increasingly also, on the impact of their publications. The question is: what if both policy objectives converged? What if academic inventors published more and higher impact (in terms of citations received) research than their non-inventor academic colleagues? If that is so, what are the implications for the use and meaning of citations received as a measure of research impact? What do academic inventors do better than non-inventor academics (in terms of research organisation and targets) to be cited more often? Our objective in this presentation is to participate in this debate, by attempting to answer the following three questions using new data on publications of Spanish academic inventors : What is the effect of patented knowledge on the impact of scientific publications? Does such effect differ depending on who owns the patent? Are there differences across academic institutions (universities v. public research centers?)
3 Academic patenting and the quality of academic research Most existing evidence indicates that there is a positive impact of patenting on the quantity and quality of academic research: academic inventors publish more and their work is cited more often than that of academic non-inventors: US universities: Agrawal and Henderson (2002); Stephan et al (2007); Fabrizio and DiMinim (2008); Azoulay et al (2009); Murray and Stern (2007 European universities: Calderini and Franzoni (2004); van Looy et al (2006); Carayol (2007); Franzoni et al (2007); Meyer (2006); Breschi et al (2005, 2007, 2008); Czarnitzki et al (2009, 2011); Crespi et al (2011); Mejer (2011) European public research centers: Buenstorf (2009) Studies on academic patenting in Spain (academic-owned): Azagra et al (2003); Azagra et al (2007); Azagra and Romero (2009); Gonzalez-Albo and Zulueta (2007); Barrio- Castro and Garcia-Quevedo (2009); Ortega (2011). Academic invented patents: Verspagen (2006); Azagra (2011) The literature on the determinants of citations received by an article have identified the following as important, among others: International coauthorship (access to different networks) Length of list of references (possibly indicating survey) Length of title (possibly indicating more keywords)
4 Spanish academic system High production in quantitative terms, low impact. According to Scimago country rank, Spain takes the 9th position in the country ranking of Scopus publications, but 18th in terms of cites per document, considering only countries with more than 100,000 in 1996-2010 (http://www.scimagojr.com) Public universities are, at least by volume, the most important player in the Spanish academic system, but public research organisations are also key. Public research organisations are a heterogeneous population in Spain, dominated by CSIC (more than 100 centers , some joint with other institutions, with more than 6.000 research staff performing research in almost all disciplines), but also including traditional field specific mission-oriented centers (e.g. CIEMAT in energy and environment) and a new kind of public research centres with a strong drive (and large budgets) to perform research that pursues excellence and socioeconomic benefits such as Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncol gicas (CNIO), Centro de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (Cruz-Castro, Sanz- Men ndez and Mart nez, 2011) 2003-2008 Scopus academic publications by author affiliation
5 Available data gives only partial view of academic contributions 1978-2009 EPO filings 2003-2008 Scopus publications with and without Spanish academic authors with and without Spanish academic applicants Source: Own elaboration based on Patstat and KUL/Eurostat sectoral classification of applicants Source: Own elaboration based on Scopus and Scimago normalisation of institutions. Need to do author-inventor matching to address our questions and get: 1) publications of Spanish academic inventors; 2) Spanish patent applications with Spanish academic inventors
6 Scopus-Patstat matching and disambiguation methodology (Maraut and Martinez 2012) PERSON & INSTITUTIONS NAME & ADDRESS MATCHING Scopus-Scopus, Patstat-Patstat Scopus-Patstat PERSON DISAMBIGUATION Scopus-Patstat RECURSIVE VALIDATION Scopus-Patstat I. Structuration Tokenisation Detection of non-name information Classification of name components II. Token matching Prefiltering Token comparison Token score III. Name matching Prefiltering Name comparison Name Score I. Name similarity variables Name matching score and rarity II. Disambiguation direct variables Same region author-inventor Same/compatible institution author- inventor Same/compatible field article-patent III. Disambiguation indirect variables Author has same affiliation as coinventor, if n.a. for inventor Author has same affiliation as coinventor in other family members, if n.a. for inventor in EPO patent Non technical area of author IV. Global score Based on name similarity, name rarity, direct and indirect disambiguation variables V. Clusters Consolidation of all author IDs and all inventor IDs corresponding to a single person from matches above a certain threshold. I. Manual checks of positive matches Focus on potential faux amis based on inconsistencies from patstat-patstat and/or scopus-scopus name matching Use all possible information available (previous phases, Internet search, etc) II.Recursive disambiguation Calculate new indirect disambiguation variables taking information from the validated matches (e.g. coauthors=coinventors) Recalculate global score and new clusters (previous phases IV and V) taking into account the new variables, repeat until all potential faux amis are controlled.
7 Results from the Patstat-Scopus matching (Maraut and Martinez 2012) 968,695 Author ID From 277,937 publications (SCOPUS) 3,413 author- inventors (40,085 Author ID, 7,661 Inventor ID) With 25,658 publications and 3,788 EPO filings 30,277 Inventor ID from 16,741 EPO filings (PATSTAT) Data sources: Scopus Patstat Frequency of Spanish names and surnames, Spanish National Official Statistics Institute (INE) Scimago normalisation of Scopus author institutions OECD Regpat (Maraut et al 2008) Scopus-Patstat fields correspondence (Schmoch et al 2011) KUL/Eurostat normalisation of Patstat applicant institutions (van Looy et al 2011)
8 Now we can draw a third line in each graph 1978-2009 EPO filings with Spanish academic applicants 2003-2008 Scopus publications with Spanish academic authors Source: Own elaboration based on Patstat Sep. 2010 and KUL/Eurostat sectoral classification of applicants Source: Own elaboration based on Scopus and Scimago normalisation of institutions.
9 and address our initial questions What is the effect of patented knowledge on the impact of scientific publications? Does such effect differ depending on who owns the patent? Are there differences across academic institutions? (Azagra, Martinez, Maraut, 2012)
10 Data Initial set of articles (196,969) From Scopus From Scopus Outliers (3,694) Non-outliers (193,275) Articles without academic authors (38,231) Articles with academic authors (155,044) From Scopus Articles with academic inventors (13,619) Articles without academic inventors (141,425) Matching Scopus to Patstat Of patents not owned or co- owned by academic institutions (5,059) Of patents owned or co- owned by academic institutions (8,560) From Patstat From the 3,413 author-inventors identified in the full matching Scopus-Patstat just described, we retain 2.892 with articles published after patents filings (but no more than 25 years later) of which we further eliminate those with non-academic affiliations, what leaves 2,202academic inventors.
11 Descriptive statistics Academic articles (n=155,044) Academic articles with academic inventors (n=13,619) Academic articles with academic inventors of academic owned patents (n=8,560) Mean Std. Dev. Variable Mean Std. Dev. Min Max Mean Std. Dev. Min Max Min Max cites (until end 2009) cityear refcount lentitle aunbr 6.28 3.17 33.93 90.64 41.86 5.72 8.04 1.69 23.53 0 1 0 0 1 46 6 2,286 374 3,031 8.05 3.03 34.84 95.35 5.92 8.81 1.64 20.77 44.98 25.05 0 1 0 0 1 46 6 589 290 2,907 8.11 2.93 35.23 95.54 6.19 8.79 1.60 20.65 44.94 31.51 0 1 0 0 1 46 6 589 279 2,90 7 1 1 - - - - - 1 1 1 22.79 daunones dauesnonac dauesacinv dauesacinvacown dauesacinv_csic dauesacinv_csicother dauesacinv_prc dauesacinvacown_csic dauesacinvacown_csicother dauesacinvacown_prc 0.40 0.10 0.09 - - - - - - - 0.49 0.30 0.28 - - - - - - - 0 0 0 - - - - - - - 1 1 1 - - - - - - - 0.34 0.11 - 0.63 0.23 0.11 0.07 - - - 0.47 0.32 - 0.48 0.42 0.32 0.25 - - - 0 0 - 0 0 0 0 - - - 1 1 - 1 1 1 1 - - - 0.35 0.11 - - - - - 0.28 0.13 0.07 0.48 0.31 - - - - - 0.45 0.34 0.25 0 0 - - - - - 0 0 0
12 Average number of citations received until end 2009 over years lapsed since publication
13 H1:Scientific publications are more cited if at least one author is an academic inventor Academic articles Negative Binomial cites OLS Variable ln(cites+1) Consistently with other studies, time lapsed since publication of the article, number of references, title length, number of authors and foreign authors have a positive and significant impact on citations received by scientific articles written by academic authors. cityear lcityear refcount lrefcount lentitle llentitle aunbr launbr daunones dauesnonac dauesacinv _cons 0.33*** 0.73*** 0.01*** 0.35*** 0.00*** 0.01*** 0.00*** 0.25*** 0.09*** -0.05*** 0.16*** -0.87*** Our estimations also show that having academic inventors among the authors have a positive effect on citations, confirming Hypothesis 1. 0.25*** 0.12*** 0.23*** -0.06*** N r2 r2_a F chi2 ll 155,044 155,044 0.35 0.35 2452.31 49014.18 -4.22E+05 -1.93E+05 p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001. Estimations include 27 dummies for scientific fields
14 H2: Scientific publications written by academic inventors are more cited if their patents are owned or co-owned by academic institutions. Academic articles with academic inventors Negative Binomial OLS Variable cites ln(cites+1) Limiting the sample to articles written by academic inventors, our estimations show that having academic authors-inventors with academic-owned patents has a positive effect on citations, confirming Hypothesis 2. cityear lcityear refcount lrefcount lentitle llentitle aunbr launbr daunones dauesnonac dauesacinv_acown _cons 0.32*** 0.80*** 0.01*** 0.36*** 0 0 0.01* 0.22*** 0.03 -0.07** 0.04** -0.57*** 0.14*** 0.03 0.09*** 0.42*** N r2 r2_a F chi2 ll 13,619 13,619 0.33 0.33 194.85 4084.5 -40787.34 -16568.62 p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001. Estimations include 27 dummies for scientific fields
15 H3: The positive effect of academic invention and ownership on citations received is higher in public research organisations than in public universities Academic articles with academic inventors of academic owned patents Negative Binomial Negative Binomial Variable cites cites Academic articles with academic inventors Repeating the previous regressions, now with a breakdown of academic authors and academic authors-inventors by type of institution of the author, our estimations show that the positive impact of academic invention and ownership on citations is highest for public research centers than for public universities (category of reference), confirming Hypothesis 3. cityear refcount lentitle aunbr daunones dauesnonac dauesacinv_csic dauesacinv_csicother dauesiacnv_prc dauesacinvacown_csic dauesacinvacown_csicother dauesacinvacown_prc _cons 0.32*** 0.01*** 0 0.01* 0.14*** 0.02 0.04* 0.20*** 0.27*** 0.33*** 0.01*** 0 0 0.13*** 0.04 Among the public research organisations, the impact is highest for non CSIC public research centers (prc), followed by CSIC joint centers with other institutions (csicother) and, lastly, other CSIC centers (csic). 0.04 0.21*** 0.30*** 0.50*** 0.40*** lnalpha _cons -0.28*** -0.30*** p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001. Estimations include 27 dummies for scientific fields Statistics N chi2 ll 13,157 4038.92 -39328.46 8,272 2484.01 -24827.16 Articles of authors with multiple academic affiliations are excluded to build four groups: universities, CSIC, CSIC-other and PRC.
16 Discussion and further work Do academic invention and ownership really deserve extra impact or is it a question of institutional egocentrism? Do universities have anything to learn from PROs? Are university-non university mixed research centres the solution? Further work Substitute inventor and ownership dummies for actual numbers of patents, weighted by citations and depreciated. Suggestions welcome