Flows of knowledge from universities and federal laboratories: Modeling the flow of patent citations over time and across institutional and geographic boundaries

Abstract

The extent to which new technological knowledge flows across institutional and national boundaries is a question of great importance for public policy and the modeling of economic growth. In this paper we develop a model of the process generating subsequent citations to patents as a lens for viewing knowledge diffusion. We find that the probability of patent citation over time after a patent is granted fits well to a double-exponential function that can be interpreted as the mixture of diffusion and obsolescense functions. The results indicate that diffusion is geographically localized. Controlling for other factors, within-country citations are more numerous and come more quickly than those that cross country boundaries.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 409 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.