Web citations in patents: Evidence of technological impact?

Patents sometimes cite webpages either as general background to the problem being addressed or to identify prior publications that limit the scope of the patent granted. Counts of the number of patents citing an organization’s website may therefore provide an indicator of its technological capacity or relevance. This article introduces methods to extract URL citations from patents and evaluates the usefulness of counts of patent web citations as a technology indicator. An analysis of patents citing 200 US universities or 177 UK universities found computer science and engineering departments to be frequently cited, as well as research-related webpages, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, or the Internet Archive. Overall, however, patent URL citations seem to be frequent enough to be useful for ranking major US and the top few UK universities if popular hosted subdomains are filtered out, but the hit count estimates on the first search engine results page should not be relied upon for accuracy.