Page 14 -

Figure 1. Average patent citations γ ( ) per patent by year

Citations also do not strictly measure non-technical or commercial impact, and
correlations with these measures likely refle ct some underlying but omitted variable. In
short, citations measure the impact of invention on future technological trajectories but
neglect the commercial and non-technical impact of the technology. However, as a proxy
for technological “breakthroughness,” patent citations previously have been used
effectively [51] and are currently the best measure available for very large datasets [32].
Given these inherent limitations of citation analysis, this work aims to enrich the measure
of patent impact via novel proxies.

2.3.2 Commercial Importance: Web Presence Analytics
We developed and tested a new quantitative measure of Web presence on several patent
sets in an attempt to develop a novel proxy measure for quantifying the commercial
impact of patents. A count of Web hits (ω) was collected by searching for each patent
2
using the search terms “patent <patent number>,” aggregating the resultant URLs, and
applying an evaluative algorithm to screen the root domains. The evaluative screening
algorithm compares URLs to a manually created list of "aggregator" website URLs that
essentially replicate information from the USPTO. Those URLs were defined as
aggregator URLs (ω agg), while the remaining were defined as potential signal URLs
(ω sig). Taken together, these new quantifiable variables for a single or a population of
patents can be effectively used to estimate commercial importance.

2 In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) specifies where an identified resource is available and
the mechanism for retrieving it. The best known example of the use of URLs is for the addresses of Web
pages on the World Wide Web. Accessed December 31, 2010.

7