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Exclusive: the science papers that patents cite the most
Richard Van Noorden is a features editor at Nature in London.
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Heidi Ledford reports for Nature from Seattle, Washington.
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Edward Chen was an intern with Nature and is now a freelance journalist in Washington DC.
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Half a century ago, biochemists Georges Köhler and César Milstein kicked off a revolution in medicine. Their 1975 paper described how to mass-produce monoclonal antibodies: proteins that can be designed to recognize and bind specifically to almost any protein target1. These antibodies have since become a workhorse of biological research and the basis of blockbuster treatments for cancer, autoimmune conditions and infectious diseases. “Such cultures could be valuable for medical and industrial use,” the paper concludes.
That was right on the money. The influence of Köhler and Milstein’s paper in academia and industry is clear from its citations. It has been cited in more than 17,000 academic papers, putting it in the world’s top 1,000 most-cited studies.
Even more strikingly, with more than 13,000 mentions in patent applications, it ranks fifth among the scholarly articles that are most cited in patents — that is, the documents filed to gain legal protection for potentially money-making inventions.
Patent citations are one way to examine how academic research flows into commercial innovation. So, with an eye to getting a sense of the most industrially influential work, Nature has charted the scholarly papers that patents cite the most.