Evolution of Co-Patent Network and Patent Citation Network Centering on Chinese Firms

This study investigates Chinese firms’ co-patenting and citation networks and examines their evolution since 1985. We used a comprehensive dataset of Chinese firms’ patent filings to analyze these networks changing structure over time. We constructed these networks and analyzed their growth, sparsity, and distribution patterns. The co-patenting network exhibits declining betweenness centrality, indicating a more decentralized innovation ecosystem. By contrast, the citation network's transitivity remains stable owing to the narrowing of the technological gap. Chinese universities hold central positions in the co-patenting network, whereas firms from the US, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and South Korea maintain active interactions with China in the citation network. Our partial correlation analysis provides insights into innovation and collaboration, highlighting the importance of central network positions and the need to balance openness and clustering to improve patenting performance. The increasingly interconnected structure of citation networks fosters a collaborative innovation environment, emphasizing the value of impactful innovations and strategic network positioning for enhanced innovation performance. These findings underscore the importance of these networks in fostering innovation and knowledge diffusion in China