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This paper investigates whether patent applicants strategically withhold citations to material prior art. Citation data suggest that applicants withhold between 21% and 33% of relevant citations. Variation in withholdings is explained by patent portfolio size and indicators of patent value. These data also highlight important differences across technology classes. In particular, firms are significantly less likely to withhold a citation when applying for chemical and drug patents. Robustness checks confirm that these results are not explained by inventor and attorney familiarity with citations, patent examiner heterogeneity, or the nationality of the inventor.

As one of the most resource-intensive and polluting manufacturing industries, the textile sector’s sustained green patenting activities are garnering increasing attention. This study investigates 48 Chinese A-share listed textile enterprises, employing a combined Necessity Condition Analysis (NCA) and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) approach. We systematically explore how five antecedent conditions, firm size, executive educational background, digital transformation, media attention, and government subsidies, collectively influence the sustained green patent application performance of textile enterprises through various configurations. The results show that no single factor qualifies as a necessary condition; rather, sustained green patenting emerges from asymmetric combinations of factors. Media attention and government subsidies appear as common core elements across configurations associated with high levels of sustained green patenting. We identify two high-performance pathways: an “environment-dominated–organisational collaboration” pathway and a “technology–environment-driven” pathway. Conversely, we uncover four pathways associated with low sustained green patenting: “environmental deficiency”, “technological inadequacy”, “organisational weakness”, and “single-factor presence”. Overall, the study elucidates the complex causal configurations shaping sustained green patenting in textile firms and offers implications for the industry’s sustainable development.

Nanotechnology patent applications published during 1991–2008 have been examined using the “title–abstract” keyword search on esp@cenet “worldwide” database. The longitudinal evolution of the number of patent applications, their topics, and their respective patent families have been evaluated for 15 national patent offices covering 98% of the total global activity. The patent offices of the United States (USA), People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, and South Korea have published the largest number of nanotechnology patent applications, and experienced significant but different growth rates after 2000. In most repositories, the largest numbers of nanotechnology patent applications originated from their own countries/regions, indicating a significant “home advantage.” The top applicant institutions are from different sectors in different countries (e.g., from industry in the US and Canada patent offices, and from academe or government agencies at the PRC office). As compared to 2000, the year before the establishment of the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), numerous new invention topics appeared in 2008, in all 15 patent repositories. This is more pronounced in the USA and PRC. Patent families have increased among the 15 patent offices, particularly after 2005. Overlapping patent applications increased from none in 1991 to about 4% in 2000 and to about 27% in 2008. The largest share of equivalent nanotechnology patent applications (1,258) between two repositories was identified between the US and Japan patent offices.

NRC publication: Yes

This paper analyzes the temporal and spatial characteristics of green invention patent applications during 1985–2018. The results show that China’s green invention patent applications present five stages of slow development, slow growth, accelerating growth, rapid growth and booming. Green invention patent applications in the fields of energy conservation, alternative energy production and waste management have always been in the forefront, but there are relatively less green invention patent applications in transportation and nuclear power; which need to be further strengthened. Green invention patent applications show a high level of geographical agglomeration in space, mainly concentrated in the eastern region, followed by the central region, the western region and northeast region. During the study period, the differences among the four major regions, eastern, northeastern, central and western, showed a trend of first expanding and then narrowing, and the intra-regional differences were the main source of spatial differences. The number of green invention patent applications in the four regions also shifted in space during the research period. The temporal and spatial evolution characteristics are correlative to national and regional innovation policies. Aiming at solving the problems of unbalanced development in different categories of green invention patent applications and regions, this paper puts forward corresponding policy suggestions.

Modern toothpastes are complex formulations with various ingredients. The aim of this study was to analyze the improvement of toothpaste formulations from 1900 to 2023 focusing on active ingredients with remineralizing, antibacterial, or plaque-removing effects, and to discuss their influence on caries prevention. For this, worldwide patent applications were searched using the international database Espacenet from the European Patent Office. Additionally, toothpaste products were searched using the Mintel product database from 1996 to 2023. The searched ingredients were (in alphabetical order): calcium carbonate, calcium phosphates, hydrated silica, sodium fluoride, sodium lauryl sulfate, triclosan, xylitol, and zinc salts as they are known from the scientific literature to be remineralizing or antibacterial/antiplaque agents. It was shown that the number of patent applications containing these ingredients significantly increased since the 1970s. As these ingredients have remineralizing, antibacterial, or plaque-removing effects, they all can contribute to caries prevention. In conclusion, and within the limitations of this approach, this study shows that toothpaste formulations have greatly improved over the past decades by using various active anticaries ingredients.

The United States patent system has become sand rather than lubricant in the wheels of American progress. Such is the premise behind this provocative and timely book by two of the nation's leading experts on patents and economic innovation. Innovation and Its Discontents tells the story of how recent changes in patenting--an institutional process that was created to nurture innovation--have wreaked havoc on innovators, businesses, and economic productivity. Jaffe and Lerner, who have spent the past two decades studying the patent system, show how legal changes initiated in the 1980s converted the system from a stimulator of innovation to a creator of litigation and uncertainty that threatens the innovation process itself. In one telling vignette, Jaffe and Lerner cite a patent litigation campaign brought by a a semi-conductor chip designer that claims control of an entire category of computer memory chips. The firm's claims are based on a modest 15-year old invention, whose scope and influenced were broadened by secretly manipulating an industry-wide cooperative standard-setting body. Such cases are largely the result of two changes in the patent climate, Jaffe and Lerner contend. First, new laws have made it easier for businesses and inventors to secure patents on products of all kinds, and second, the laws have tilted the table to favor patent holders, no matter how tenuous their claims. After analyzing the economic incentives created by the current policies, Jaffe and Lerner suggest a three-pronged solution for restoring the patent system: create incentives to motivate parties who have information about the novelty of a patent; provide multiple levels of patent review; and replace juries with judges and special masters to preside over certain aspects of infringement cases. Well-argued and engagingly written, Innovation and Its Discontents offers a fresh approach for enhancing both the nation's creativity and its economic growth.

In this study, we investigate and compare the number of examiners’ forward citations in the United States and Japan. The most effective way to do so is to compare pairs of patent applications that have equivalent content. Therefore, we propose a new method of extracting substantially equivalent pairs of US and Japanese patent applications, focusing on the equivalence of the specifications and the claims. Our results reveal that during the substantive examination, US examiners cite patent application publications (PAPs) as well as granted patent publications (GPPs), whereas Japanese examiners tend to cite PAPs only. We further examine why GPPs are frequently cited by US examiners. The most likely reason seems to be that many US examiners retain the old habit of searching and citing only GPPs, but not PAPs. The insights offered by this study could be significant for future analyses based on the number of citations, particularly in the United States.

In this study, we validated the usefulness of examiners’ forward citations, especially from the viewpoint of the applicants’ self-selection (ASS) decisions during the patent application procedure. We believe that the ASS in an early stage would be decided by a potential-value comparison among patent applications. We focused on six self-selection decision points of the applicants: whether to file patent applications in foreign countries, request for examination, request for accelerated examination, reply to a notification of reasons for refusal, appeal after receiving a decision of refusal, and register after receiving a decision to grant a patent as patent value parameters. We found that application groups that selected “Yes” have a significantly larger number of examiners’ forward citations than groups that selected “No” at all decision points. In addition, we confirmed that applications that were finally granted and those that were renewed for a full term after grant have a significantly large number of examiners’ forward citations. We concluded that the number of examiners’ forward citations would be a useful indicator of the potential value of patent applications in macroscopic analysis.

Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries 1 – 4 . Around the world, scientists and inventors are more plentiful and interconnected today than ever before 4 . However, although there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in new ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find 5 , 6 —contradicting recombinant growth theory 7 , 8 . Here we shed light on this apparent puzzle. Analysing 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications from across the globe over the past half-century, we begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across cities, underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors globally. We further show that across all fields, periods and team sizes, researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their on-site counterparts. Creating a dataset that allows us to explore the division of labour in knowledge production within teams and across space, we find that among distributed team members, collaboration centres on late-stage, technical tasks involving more codified knowledge. Yet they are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks—such as conceiving new ideas and designing research—when knowledge is tacit 9 . We conclude that despite striking improvements in digital technology in recent years, remote teams are less likely to integrate the knowledge of their members to produce new, disruptive ideas. Analysis of research articles and patent applications shows that members of teams that collaborate remotely are less likely to make breakthrough discoveries than members of on-site teams.