Patents and the Relative Citation Ratio: Correlations to Assess NIH Impact

We previously referenced Ioannidis’ and Khoury’s “PQRST” mnemonic for describing research impact: “P” is productivity, “Q” is quality, “R” is reproducibility, “S” is sharing, and “T” is translation.  We wrote several blogs about “P,” productivity, focusing on publications, citations, and more recently the Relative Citation Ratio.  Now we’ll focus on a different kind of “P” for productivity, namely patents (which arguably are also related to “T” for translation).  We’ll also take a brief look at “S” for sharing. In the April 7, 2017 issue of Science, Danielle Li [now with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)], Pierre Azoulay (MIT), and Bhaven Sampat (Columbia University) published an investigation on the patent productivity of NIH grants. They identified over 365,000 grants NIH funded between 1980 and 2007, and linked them to patents. Two kinds of links were identified: “direct” links in which a patent cited an NIH grant, and “indirect” links, in which a patent cited a paper which in turn acknowledged support from an NIH grant. The authors found that close to 10% of grants directly generate a patent. That’s remarkable!  But perhaps even more so, nearly 30% of grants generate a paper that is later cited by at least one patent. Even more remarkable, grants directly and indirectly generated patents whether they were “disease-targeted” or not, “patient-oriented” or not, or linked to a Request For Appl...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike bibliometrics citations Funding data publications RCR Source Type: funding