Doctoral Graduates and Inventive Activities in Four European Countries (Doc-Track)

Since September 2022, INCHER has been part of the DOC-TRACK research. Together with researchers from IPP-CSIC Madrid (Catalina Martinez), the University of Bordeaux (Francesco Lissoni, Ernest Miguelez), and Utrecht University (Andrea Morrison, Fabiana Visentin), a new dataset is being built mapping the patent activities of STEM PhDs in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. The project will run three years and is funded by the Academic Research Programme of the European Patent Office.

Based on electronic doctoral theses (EDT) repositories, we match information on the doctoral graduates of France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain to patent and scientific publication data. We thus identify both the graduates who become inventors and those who become scientists and publish articles cited in the patent literature, either directly (patent->graduate's publication citation) or indirectly (patent->other publications->graduate's publication citation chain). We collect the same information for the graduates' supervisors. We then explore the factors affecting the probability of graduates engaging in inventor careers and/or scientific careers, but with invention-relevant publications. These include gender and the supervisors' scientific and inventive records. For France and Germany, we also focus on the specific contributions of foreign graduates.