The Handbook of Technology and Innovation Management

10.4. Additional Insights from Highly-Cited Articles

This section takes a closer look at recent IP-related articles that are particularly influential, as evidenced by the number of citations they have received in other academic studies. As Kim et al. (2006) and Judge et al. (2007) discuss, citations to academic articles can reflect numerous factors, including the significance of an article's contributions, the provocative nature of the study or its findings, and the author's reputation as a leading scholar on the subject. In other instances, citations can reflect 'herding' tendencies where articles are frequently cited even if they are infrequently read. Although prone to many interpretations, citation counts nonetheless remain the most common metric used to estimate the 'impact' or 'influence' of academic publications.

Citation counts were compiled for each IP-related article identified from the searches reported earlier. Following standard practice, the Social Science Citations Index on ISI's Web of Knowledge was used to identify citations. When working papers listed in ISI by the same author(s) shared the same title as a published article on the list, citations to the earlier working paper were included. The information was downloaded from ISI citations in June 2007. As a result, the true impact of recent articles (with fewer years 'at risk' of being cited) will be biased downward relative to that reported for older articles in the group.

The results of this exercise are quite ...