GoKawiilHalf a century ago, biochemists Georges Köhler and César Milstein kicked off a revolution in medicine. Their 1975 paper described how to mass-produce monoclonal antibodies: proteins that can be designed to recognize and bind specifically to almost any protein target1. These antibodies have since become a workhorse of biological research and the basis of blockbuster treatments for cancer, autoimmune conditions and infectious diseases. “Such cultures could be valuable for medical and industrial use,” the paper concludes.
The most-cited papers of the twenty-first century
That was right on the money. The influence of Köhler and Milstein’s paper in academia and industry is clear from its citations. It has been cited in more than 17,000 academic papers, putting it in the world’s top 1,000 most-cited studies.
Even more strikingly, with more than 13,000 mentions in patent applications, it ranks fifth among the scholarly articles that are most cited in patents — that is, the documents filed to gain legal protection for potentially money-making inventions.
Patent citations are one way to examine how academic research flows into commercial innovation. So, with an eye to getting a sense of the most industrially influential work, Nature has charted the scholarly papers that patents cite the most.
One might expect this list to be a parade of commercially important research. Köhler and Milstein’s paper is one such example: it netted them a share of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and other Nobel-prizewinning work appears in the list.
César Milstein (left) and Georges Köhler received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984.Borje Thuresson/Keystone/Getty
In fact, the list of top-cited studies in patents presents some surprising results, because of the vagaries of the patenting process and its conventions about what to reference. Although many papers have obvious importance, some studies in the list are rarely mentioned in academic journals, and even their authors don’t know why they are cited in so many patents.
“Causality in knowledge flows between scholarly work and patents is not a simple matter,” says Richard Jefferson, the founder and former director of The Lens Project, a free database of patents and scholarly works that was one source for Nature’s analysis. (Jefferson is chief scientist at the non-profit social enterprise Cambia in Canberra, Australia.)
Nonetheless, the exercise does reveal insights about the influence of academia on industry: not least, that the majority of papers most cited in patents are the product of publicly funded research.
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