Researchers studying innovation increasingly use indicators based on patent citations. However, it is well known that not all citations originate from applicants - patent examiners contribute to citations listed in issued patents - and that this could complicate interpretation of findings in...

Analysis of patent citations is a core methodology in the study of knowledge diffusion, and forward citations are used as a measure of impact of innovations. However, citations made by patent examiners have not been separately reported, adding unknown noise to the data. We leverage a recent...