Design Citations and Patent Basicness

Patents make citations to designs and do receive citations from them. Design are inherently applied, and their citations in a patent or to it imply that the patent should be of an applied nature, too. However, the existing metrics of basicness that rely on citations do not properly take this information into account and may still show these patents as very basic. I begin by showing that design citations to and from patents are more common than thought. They are also more frequent among patents in less basic areas of technology and among patents lodged by businesses in the absence of collaboration with government or other research institutes. Focusing on the generality index, I use a decomposition method to show how it mis-aligns with basicness and where the bias is originating from. Based on the results, I propose a simple fix. I test the revised index on university versus corporate patents. The fix generates a bigger basciness gap between patents registered by academia versus the corporate ones than previously predicted.