Disambiguation and co-authorship networks of the U.S. patent inventor database (1975–2010)

Research into invention, innovation policy, and technology strategy can greatly benefit from an accurate understanding of inventor careers. The United States Patent and Trademark Office does not provide unique inventor identifiers, however, making large-scale studies challenging. Many scholars of innovation have implemented ad-hoc disambiguation methods based on string similarity thresholds and string comparison matching; such methods have been...