Many have advocated for the expansion of peer review to improve scientific judgments in law and public policy. One such test case is the patent examination process, with numerous commentators arguing that scientific peer review can solve informational deficits in patent determinations. We present results from a novel randomized field experiment, carried out over the course of three years, in which 336 prominent scientific experts agreed to provide input on U.S. patent applications. Their input was edited for compliance with submission requirements and submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) by our research team. We show that the intervention caused examiners to (1) increase search efforts and citations to the non‐patent (scientific) literature and (2) grant the application at lower rates in the first instance. However, results were substantially weaker and resource costs substantially higher than anticipated in the literature, highlighting significant challenges and questions of institutional design in bringing scientific expertise into law and government.

中文翻译：

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改进法律和政府的科学判断：专利同行评审的现场试验

许多人主张扩大同行评审的范围，以改善法律和公共政策方面的科学判断。一个这样的测试案例就是专利审查过程，许多评论员认为科学的同行评审可以解决专利确定中的信息缺陷。我们介绍了一项为期三年的新型随机领域实验的结果，其中336名杰出的科学专家同意提供有关美国专利申请的意见。他们的输入经过编辑以符合提交要求，并由我们的研究团队提交给美国专利商标局（USPTO）。我们表明，干预导致审查员（1）加大了对非专利（科学）文献的检索力度和引用，并且（2）在一开始就以较低的比率批准了该申请。然而，