Tobias Buchmann | Searcharxiv

arXiv2021

A Text-Embedding-based Approach to Measure Patent-to-Patent Technological Similarity -- Workflow, Code, and Applications

This paper describes an efficiently scalable approach to measure technological similarity between patents by combining embedding techniques from natural language processing with nearest-neighbor approximation. Using this methodology we are able to compute existing similarities between all patents, which in turn enables us to represent the whole patent universe as a technological network. We validate both technological signature and similarity in various ways, and demonstrate at the case of electric vehicle technologies their usefulness to measure knowledge flows, map technological change, and create patent quality indicators. Thereby the paper contributes to the growing literature on text-based indicators for patent analysis. We provide thorough documentations of the method, including all code, indicators, and intermediate outputs at https://github.com/daniel-hain/patent_embedding_research.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2017

Meet me in the middle: The reunification of Germany's research network

In 1990, Germany began the reunification of two separate research systems. In this study, we explore the factors predicting the East-West integration of academic fields by examining the evolution of Germany's co-authorship network between 1974 and 2014. We find that the unification of the German research network accelerated rapidly during the 1990s, but then stagnated at an intermediate level of integration. We then study the integration of the 20 largest academic fields (by number of publications prior to 1990), finding an inverted U-shaped relationship between each field's East or West "dominance" (a measure of the East-West concentration of a field's scholarly output prior to 1990) and the fields' subsequent level of integration. We checked for the robustness of these results by running Monte Carlo simulations and a differences-in-differences analysis. Both methods confirmed that fields that were dominated by either West or East Germany prior to reunification integrated less than those whose output was balanced. Finally, we explored the origins of this inverted U-shaped relationship by considering the tendency of scholars from a given field to collaborate with scholars from similarly productive regions. These results shed light on the mechanisms governing the reintegration of research networks that were separated by institutions.

physics.soc-ph↗