# Community structure in co-inventor networks affects time to first citation for patents

## TL;DR

This study explores how community structures in co-inventor networks influence the time it takes for patents to receive their first citation, revealing that shared community membership accelerates knowledge dissemination.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that inventor community structures significantly affect citation timing and validates the robustness of this effect across different community detection algorithms.

## Key findings

- Shared inventor communities reduce time to first citation.
- Community detection algorithms yield consistent results.
- Network analysis quantifies knowledge flow acceleration.

## Abstract

We have investigated community structure in the co-inventor network of a given cohort of patents and related this structure to the dynamics of how these patents acquire their first citation. A statistically significant difference in the time lag until first citation is linked to whether or not this citation comes from a patent whose listed inventors share membership in the same communities as the inventors of the cited patent. Although the inventor-community structures identified by different community-detection algorithms differ in several aspects, including the community-size distribution, the magnitude of the difference in time to first citation is robustly exhibited. Our work is able to quantify the expected acceleration of knowledge flow within inventor communities and thereby further establishes the utility of network-analysis tools for studying innovation dynamics.