ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the relationship between patenting and publishing at the project level. It uses Japan’s Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research database. Japan’s Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research is the major funding source for academic researchers in Japan. This database provides information on inputs (budget, period, project members, etc.) and outputs (publications and patents) from each funded research project. The main finding is that patenting has a curvilinear correlation with higher impact, i.e. the number of higher impact publications from funded research projects increases with the number of patents only to a certain amount, and after a peak, it decreases. Our finding implies that if a finding is a relatively significant and marketable breakthrough, researchers who have the possibility of patenting in mind become less likely to share their results openly. Meanwhile, previous studies implicitly assumed that researchers have to make a choice between basic or applied research projects, or for a particular research project choose to make it more applied or basic. Another finding of this study is that the assumption applies to projects. Our findings imply that a heavy emphasis on patenting may reduce the amount of high-quality publishing of scientific research.

摘要

本文在项目层面研究了专利申请和出版之间的关系。它使用日本的科学研究资助数据库。日本的科学研究补助金是日本学术研究人员的主要资金来源。该数据库提供有关每个受资助研究项目的投入（预算、期间、项目成员等）和产出（出版物和专利）的信息。主要发现是专利申请与较高影响力呈曲线相关，即受资助研究项目的较高影响力出版物数量仅随着专利数量的增加而增加，并在达到峰值后减少。我们的发现意味着，如果一个发现是一个相对重要且适销对路的突破，有可能申请专利的研究人员不太可能公开分享他们的结果。同时，先前的研究隐含地假设研究人员必须在基础或应用研究项目之间做出选择，或者为特定的研究项目选择使其更具应用性或基础性。这项研究的另一个发现是该假设适用于项目。我们的研究结果表明，过分强调专利可能会减少高质量的科学研究发表数量。