Research notes · Knowledge

How much of what gets patented rests on publicly funded science?

What the authors found

Marx builds a comprehensive linkage between patents and the scientific articles they cite, a mapping that had not existed at scale. The reason it matters is that patent citations to science are the clearest available trace of publicly funded research entering private invention, and the linkage lets researchers follow specific findings from a journal into a commercial claim.

What our data adds

This database holds both ends of that link as national aggregates, and their ratio is revealing even without the linkage. China publishes 932,712 scientific and technical journal articles a year against the United States' 430,843 — more than twice as many. India is third at 228,174, ahead of Germany at 108,782 and the United Kingdom at 97,536. On patents the composition differs sharply by country: in Hong Kong 98.2 per cent of applications come from non-residents, in Mexico 93.1 per cent and in Australia 90.8 per cent. Those are economies where the patent system is used mainly by foreigners to secure a market, not by residents to protect invention.

What this cannot show

Counting articles and counting patents says nothing about the link between them, which is the paper's entire contribution — that requires the citation graph, an object this platform's data model cannot express. Article counts are also sensitive to which journals a database indexes, and the rise in Chinese output partly reflects changing coverage. A patent application is not an invention, and a scientific article is not a discovery.

The data behind it

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