Title: Early identification of important patents through network centrality,
Abstract: One of the most challenging problems in technological forecasting is to
identify as early as possible those technologies that have the potential to
lead to radical changes in our society. In this paper, we use the US patent
citation network (1926-2010) to test our ability to early identify a list of
historically significant patents through citation network analysis. We show
that in order to effectively uncover these patents shortly after they are
issued, we need to go beyond raw citation counts and take into account both the
citation network topology and temporal information. In particular, an
age-normalized measure of patent centrality, called rescaled PageRank, allows
us to identify the significant patents earlier than citation count and PageRank
score. In addition, we find that while high-impact patents tend to rely on
other high-impact patents in a similar way as scientific papers, the patents'
citation dynamics is significantly slower than that of papers, which makes the
early identification of significant patents more challenging than that of
significant papers.