Measuring China's patent quality: Development and validation of ISR indices

Abstract

Because China has become one of the largest applicants of PCT patents, it is of interest to compare the quality of Chinese and non-Chinese applications. We extend a quality index based on internationally comparable citation data from international search reports (ISR) to consider foreign, domestic, and self citations. Whereas foreign citations show that Chinese PCT patent applications reach only a third of the non-Chinese quality benchmark, the extension towards domestic and self citations suggests a higher quality level that converges to or even surpasses the benchmark. We investigate these differences based on firm-level regressions and find that in China, only foreign citations, but not domestic and self citations, have a significant and positive relation to R&D stocks. Using Germany as a representative country without policy support for patenting, we show that all three citations types may be used as economic indicators if policy distortion is not a concern. Our results show that domestic and self citations suffer from an upward bias in China and should be employed with caution if they are to be interpreted as a measure of patent quality.

Patent landscape of not-in-kind active cooling technologies between 1998 and 2017

“…Furthemore, the decline of Japan's and the rise of emerging Asian economies of South Korea, Taiwan, and China have been observed in overall patent applications and quality (Kwon et al, 2017). The surge of Patent landscape of not-in-kind active cooling technologies between 1998 and 2017 patent applications from China in the last two decades has been signicantly driven by government patent subsidy programs, among other aspects such as increasing investment and supportive legal changes (Li, 2012;Prudhomme, 2015;Boeing and Mueller, 2019). However, such programs have been found to foster the applications of low-quality patents (Dang and Motohashi, 2015;Chen and Zhang, 2019).…”

China's Challenges in Moving towards a High-income Economy

“…The increase in applications does not mean that patent quality, measured in terms of citations, is high. Fisch et al (2017) observe that, compared with the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea, Chinese patents have lower value in terms of citations, with similar findings made by Boeing and Mueller (2019). Dai and Cheng (2018) assess the effect of product innovation on firm markup and productivity, using a large sample of Chinese manufacturing firms.…”

how the quality of patents contributes to revitalising the innovation system?, evidence from the renewable energy sector

“…Subsequently, Hall & Jaffe (2001), used normalized citation counts by technology and priority years of the patent. A constraint in this method is that it does not investigate how the patent quality progresses over time (Boeing & Mueller, 2019). Reitzig (2004), applied value indicators to estimate the value of patents -classifying the indicators into first, second and third generations.…”

“…Researchers and policymakers have shown keen interest in patent analysis (Abbas et al, 2014;Squicciarini et al, 2013;Tseng et al, 2007). In this sense, the patent information systems provide several measures that have been used as quality indicators for patent analysis (Boeing & Mueller, 2019). However, the patent information sources, especially in Latin America, are scarce, and that makes the study of these topics in the region complex and critical (Barroso et al, 2009).…”