Comparing patent front-page and in-text references to science

Patent citations to science provide a paper trail of knowledge flow from science to innovation, and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, most studies rely on patent front-page references. We compare these two types of references and test whether they lead to the same analytical results regarding the relationship between science and innovation. Using a dataset of 33,337 USPTO biotech utility patents and their 860,879 in-text references and 637,570 front-page references to Web of Science journal articles, we found a remarkable low overlap between these two types of references. In-text references are more basic and have more scientific citations than front-page references. In-text references are less interdisciplinary but more novel than front-page references, but the differences are small. Furthermore, they lead to very different results when investigating how basicness, interdisciplinarity, novelty, and scientific citations affect patent citations.