Authorship, inventorship and division of labor in innovative research: an analysis of paper-patent pairs

Collaboration has long become the norm in science, and research is performed by increasingly large teams. Collaboration can take diverse forms, bring together researchers from different fields, status, and skills, and may lead to different patterns of tasks division between team members. This complicates the attribution of credit to individual authors, undermines research evaluation processes, and potentially reduces the efficacy of the reward system of science. This work in progress investigates division of labor and among team members using discoveries that were disclosed in both a patent and a paper, both document thus forming a paper-patent pair (PPP). Since the inventor status on a patent is attributed, in principle, for specific types of contribution (namely, those of a conceptual nature), comparing authors and inventors lists of PPPs can provide new insights on the division of labor and credit attribution practices in scientific research This work analyzes the relationship between the author and inventor lists of 1,568 PPPs from five disciplines. We find that the individuals who are both authors and inventors are polarized towards the first and last author position. However, there appears to be disciplinary differences in the distribution of inventors in the various positions of the authors list.