Identification of university-based patents: A new large-scale approach

Recent political initiatives and changes in the intellectual property rights systems of European countries call for improved evaluation methods. The aim of this article is to present a new approach to the identification of academic patents and to test its applicability. The approach is based on the matching of author names from scientific publications with inventor names from patent filings and is demonstrated by university-based patents in Germany. Measuring academic patent activity remains a complex task, as there are many cases of university-based patents not being filed by the universities themselves. Previous approaches relying on official staff lists of universities or searches for keywords provided interesting new findings. But, they tend to be time-consuming and cost-intensive or are to a large extent based on estimations. In this article, we show that our suggested approach is a reliable, but less expensive alternative. Besides significant methodological contributions, the article also indicates promising future research avenues for country comparisons, comparisons over time, and analyses at the level of individual academic institutions.