This one is from the NY Times (Andrew Martin, "Immigrants Are Crucial to Innovation, Study Says" June 25, 2012). The problem is that the study doesn't really say that, but it is from an obviously biased source and may be calculated to mislead us to think that's what it says. The source is the Partnership for a New American Economy, which backs increasing allowable immigration of skilled foreign workers.
Here's what it actually says: "76% of patents awarded to the top 10 patent-producing US universities in 2011 had at least one foreign-born inventor.” Whether that means that "immigrants are crucial to innovation" depends on how many inventors there are in a typical patent: if only 1 or 2, then if 76% of those 1 or 2 include an immigrant, immigrants are clearly playing a major role in these inventions. But if patents typically have, say, 20 inventors, then the fact that 76% of them include at least one immigrant inventor doesn't mean much. Consider an extreme analogy: "Study reports that 99% of basketball audiences include at least one member of the mafia." Would that lead to concern that NBA attendance was heavily dependent on the mafia?
I'm not sure what is typical for the number of inventors per patent (I've seen 20), but the study authors almost certainly had the relevant figures, and they could have told us the average percentage of immigrants for those inventions. But they didn't give us that unambiguous figure. I wonder why. The author of the Times article should also have wondered why, and not simply parroted the study's meaningless-but-misleading statement.
The article was promptly picked up by other news outlets, which predictably took the bait and claimed that immigrants were "responsible" for 76% of patents. So Partnership for a New American Economy got it's wish: to get the press to misread and misrepresent a truthful but meaningless statement.
The publication by the 'Partnership for a New American Economy' can be downloaded here
ReplyDeletehttp://www.renewoureconomy.org/sites/all/themes/pnae/patent-pending.pdf
Their data gathering methods are described in two footnotes, reprinted below.
Labor-intensive, I think.
I think I will ask the "Partnership" to share their raw data. I'll let you know what I learn!
Footnotes:
1. To derive the patent counts, we used the data on patent assignees available
from Patent Full-Text and Image Database maintained by the US Patent
and Trademark Office (Available at: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/
search-adv.htm). The database is a comprehensive source of information on
the patents assigned in 2011, displaying patent information as it appears on
the day the patent is granted—any subsequent revisions to the patent itself
or the named inventors is not included. Our patent counts include only new
patents, and exclude any reissued patents awarded to universities in 2011.
2. In most cases, when applying for a patent, inventors submit an oath or power
of attorney form on which they must indicate their citizenship. We accessed
these forms through the publicly-available Patent Application Information
Retrieval (“PAIR”) Website maintained by the United States Patent and
Trademark Office (http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair). However,
because many inventors may have been born abroad but subsequently gained
US citizenship, we further researched each inventor individually – reading
about their backgrounds through publicly available university profiles or
online resumes, LinkedIn profiles, news articles, or information we obtained
by contacting the inventor or their school directly. For purposes of the
research, professors with undergraduate degrees from abroad were counted as
natives of the country where they earned their degree when no other information was available.
Great! It would be interesting to see a meaningful estimate of the extent of non-citizen contributions. I wonder if the data suggests a distinction between major and minor contributors when there are numerous named inventors (e.g. listing order)?
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