The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of patent citation data in social science research. Facilitated by digitization of the patent data and increasing computing power, a community of practice has grown up that has developed methods for using these data to: measure...

The quantity of citations (“times cited”) has evolved into an influential indicator of scientific impact both in itself and packaged into other metrics (e.g. h-index, impact factor). In this study we contrast the idea of “quantity” with the idea of the “quality” of citations, i.e....