Patents’ favorite papers: the science most cited in filings

Nature analyzes which scholarly papers appear most often on patent front pages and in their text, revealing that life-science research—especially antibody science and bioinformatics tools like BLAST—dominates patent citations. Notable examples include the 1975 Köhler–Milstein monoclonal antibody paper (highly cited in patents), a 1994 Colman antibody paper with thousands of patent mentions despite few journal citations, and the 1990 BLAST software paper as the most-cited front-page patent reference. The study, drawing on The Lens and Reliance on Science datasets, shows patent references are driven by legal needs to map state of the art and that many top-cited papers are publicly funded; differences between front-page and in-text citations also reveal how methods and plant biology papers accrue patent mentions.