Why do Inventors Reference Papers and Patents in their Patent Applications?

Introduction Patent citation analysis is a widely used technique in the evaluation of science and technology. The basic premise behind its use is that papers or patents cited as prior art by many later patents tend to contain important ideas upon which numerous inventors have built. This does not mean that every important document is highly cited, or that every highly cited document is important. However, numerous validation studies have revealed the existence of a strong positive relationship between citations and technological importance (see Breitzman and Mogee (2002) for a review of validation studies). In several previous studies, 1790 Analytics has shown that papers appearing in IEEE journals, and papers presented at IEEE sponsored conferences, are cited heavily by later patents (Breitzman, 2009). This high citation impact suggests that these IEEE papers have had a strong impact on subsequent patented inventions. However, the nature of this impact is not explicitly examined in these previous studies, particularly in terms of why a patent inventor chooses to reference a particular paper or patent. In this paper, we summarize the results of a survey examining why inventors reference prior art. We then examine the implications of the survey findings for the results of previous IEEE patent studies.