Review of book "Patents, Citations, and Innovations:A Window on the Knowledge Economy, MIT Press 2002 478 pages

[Eugene Garfield]

The authors are Adam B. Jaffe and Manuel Trajtenberg. The book is now
four years old, but there is an excellent review by Frank Cowell of the
London School of economics in the journal of Economic Literature, v.42,
p.1158,  June 2004 in which he  states "As the authors persuasively
establish, the number of times a patent is cited in future patents can
be an extremely useful indicator of its technological significance."
Their work builds on the earlier work of Jacob Schmookler (1966) and Zvi
Griliches "who inspired an entire school of researchers to push the
investigation further by making creative use of patent records in
conjunction with other data, and by developing new methods of
measurement and analysis. Despite all of the insight that can b gleaned
from   patent statistics., however, both admirers and skeptics are fully
cognizant of the limitations associated with implicitly treating all
patented inventions as if they were equal."

 

 

 

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