Doctor Evangelos Bourelos, Professor Maureen McKelvey and Visiting Research Fellow Berna Beyhan at the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship have written a paper which has been published in Research Evaluation.
The paper "Is the prominent scientist the one who becomes an inventor? A matching of Swedish academic pairs in nanoscience to examine the effect of publishing on patenting", deals with a generally discussed issue that is how academics can combine basic with applied research. Modern science has brought back to discussion of whether there is a trade-off between science and technology for academics. The discussion becomes particularly interesting in new emerging fields, such as nanoscience.
Nanoscience is an interdisciplinary field, in which science, in terms of publications, and technology, in terms of inventions, is closely related. Sweden represents an interesting setting to examine how they are related because a high proportion of the total Swedish academic patents can be classified as nanoscience. The main question addressed is whether or not prominent academic scientists in terms of scientific publications are also the ones who become academic inventors. The empirical results show that academics who both publish and patent have, on average, more publications as well as more citations. Furthermore, having a higher number of citations can increase the probability of having a patent. Interdisciplinarity is also positively correlated with patenting. Thus, by isolating the effects of publishing on patenting, this paper demonstrates that scientific prominence, indicated both by the number of articles and citations, positively impacts the propensity to take patents.