Measuring the global and domestic technological impact of Chinese scientific output: a patent-to-paper citation analysis of science-technology linkage

Abstract

Tracing the utilization of science in technological innovations, especially the fraction with regard to public research, is of major importance in science policy. We explore the evolution of the global and domestic technological impact of Chinese scientific output with a detailed analysis of 6,901,428 utility patents granted at USPTO from 1976 to 2020 and their 337,949 citations to Chinese scientific publications. The results show that Chinese scientific output plays an increasingly critical role in science-based innovations while its contributions to domestic and foreign technology are fluctuated over the period. The domestic use of Chinese research is shrinking in late 1990s but keeps increasing thereafter. The technological impact of Chinese scientific output varies in different technology sectors. The recent growing share of Chinese-invented technology in the citing patents is dominated by Chinese patents in digital communication. The time lag of domestic citations is smaller than foreign citations, which is partially owing to the self-citations of Chinese inventors. However, the contributions of self-citations to short knowledge diffusion times are heterogeneous across technology fields. The largest producer of the cited science is universities and the next is public research organizations. Companies account for a meager quantity of total citations and their proportion is shrinking since 2007. Specifically, private technology depends substantially on public research for scientific knowledge. A national bias is found in the scientific knowledge components of patents assigned to companies, which to a certain point indicates the area where academia and industry hold a close relationship in China and Chinese companies are specialized. Taken together, these findings provide a dynamic country- and sector-dependent linkage of Chinese scientific output to domestic and global technology.