Reliance on Scientific Ideas in Patenting

Scientific ideas drive firm innovation, yet measuring firms’ reliance on science remains a challenge. Prior research has often relied on patent-to-paper citations, whose primary purpose is to delineate the legal scope of a patent rather than to document all scientific ideas on which it builds. We develop a novel text-based approach that identifies when patents reuse specific ideas from the scientific literature. We validate this method, including using firm R&D lab–level survey data, and show that patents frequently build on prior scientific ideas without citing the original source paper, particularly when the paper is older or less similar in content. Finally, we demonstrate that reliance on scientific ideas positively correlates with the private value of patents, even after controlling for traditional patent-to-paper citations and within the subset of patents without such citations. Together, these results suggest that traditional citation-based measures underestimate the role of science and illustrate the complementary value of our textbased approach and open dataset for studying how scientific knowledge contributes to firm innovation.