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Patents

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.

Biomedical discovery and innovation are team-driven endeavors. In academic settings, teams are composed mainly of trainees—including students, postdoctoral fellows and professional scientists—and are headed by a principal investigator responsible for articulating a broad scientific direction for the lab, securing research funding and guiding the production of scientific papers. However, the prevalent team composition in the biomedical innovation ecosystem, which is responsible for translating scientific findings into technologies suitable for commercialization, is quite different. Here, university technology transfer professionals, investors, lawyers, principal investigators and lab members operate as stakeholders in various stages of this translation process1,2,3,4. One critical step in translation is the patenting of technologies they consider suitable for commercialization. This enables technology to be passed along the commercialization pipeline for further development through either an academic spinout or out-licensing to operating firms2.

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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.

Peer review

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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