The impact of boundary spanning scholarly publications and patents

Abstract

Background: Human knowledge and innovation are recorded in two media: scholarly publication and patents. These records not only document a new scientific insight or new method developed, but they also carefully cite prior work upon which the innovation is built.

Methodology: We quantify the impact of information flow across fields using two large citation dataset: one spanning over a century of scholarly work in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and second spanning a quarter century of United States patents.

Conclusions: We find that a publication's citing across disciplines is tied to its subsequent impact. In the case of patents and natural science publications, those that are cited at least once are cited slightly more when they draw on research outside of their area. In contrast, in the social sciences, citing within one's own field tends to be positively correlated with impact.

Figure 1. Information flow matrix for journals in the JSTOR database.

The direction of information flow is from the column discipline to the row discipline, with , the Z-score, corresponding to the row and column. Each entry is shaded according to a normalized Z-score representing whether the number of citations between disciplines is higher or lower than expected at random. Darker shading represents higher Z-scores. The diagonal represents citations within the same discipline.

Figure 2. Information flow matrix for patents, with several related areas labeled.

Figure 3. Correlations between proximity and impact , partitioned by percentile of impact.

For example, at the 20% percentile, we show for the bottom 20% of publications by their impact , and for the top 20% by . No correlations are shown for the bottom 10–20% of publications because they received no citations.

Figure 4. Average community proximity of citations by impact of citing article in JSTOR.

The inset shows the average trend for patents.

Figure 5. Correlations between citation proximity and impact, for patents published between 2000 and 2006, separated by whether the citation was added by an inventor or patent examiner.

Figure 6. Average community proximity between communities over time.