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Who counts as an inventor? Seniority and gender in 430,000 biomedical inventor–researcher teams

Nature Biotechnology volume 41, pages 610–614 (2023)Cite this article

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An analysis of the overlap of authors and inventors in a comprehensive citation map of patents to the biomedical research literature reveals significant and persistent disparities within the commercialization process.

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Fig. 1: Publications that are cited by their authors as part of patents are distinct from the broader biomedical research literature.
Fig. 2: Research team members’ seniority-based representation in patent inventorship status (N = 430,198).
Fig. 3: Research team demographic representation as a function of authorship position.

Data availability

Patent data is publicly available at https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/google_patents_public_datasets/google-patents-public-data, and the PubMed publication information can be downloaded at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/baseline. The code and data are available at https://github.com/amanjuna/patent_impact.

Code availability

The code and data are available at https://github.com/amanjuna/patent_impact.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank M. Lemley, R. Malenka, K. Nikolich and R. Weisberg for feedback and advice. J.Z. is supported by grants from the Silicon Valley Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Anoop Manjunath, Arya Gowda, Rohaan Umbarkar, Esha Umbarkar, James Y. Zou & Ishan Kumar

  2. Stanford Law School, Stanford, CA, USA

    Nathan Kahrobai & Ishan Kumar

  3. The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Washington, DC, USA

    Jaya Manjunath

  4. Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine/Stanford Children’s Hospital, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Angelina Seffens

  5. Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, CA, USA

    James Y. Zou

  6. Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Ishan Kumar

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  1. Anoop Manjunath
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Contributions

A.M., J.Y.Z. and I.K. developed concepts and experiments. A.M., N.K., J.M., A.G., E.U., R.U. and A.S. performed data extraction, mapping and processing. A.M. and A.S. prepared visualizations. I.K. and A.M. wrote the paper, with help from J.Y.Z. and A.S. J.Y.Z. and I.K. supervised the work.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Anoop Manjunath, James Y. Zou or Ishan Kumar.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information

Nature Biotechnology thanks Osmat Jefferson and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–7, Tables 1 and 2, and Methods

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Manjunath, A., Kahrobai, N., Manjunath, J. et al. Who counts as an inventor? Seniority and gender in 430,000 biomedical inventor–researcher teams. Nat Biotechnol 41, 610–614 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-023-01771-2

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