The objective of this contract was to produce data about the relations among the components of the ERA, with a special focus on the links between university and other actors.

References found in patent documents measured part of the relations among the components of the ERA. To understand why, it was necessary to know what they express.
In patents, applicants describe the prior art through references to prove the patent officers the novelty of the invention; patent officers themselves add or reject references.
Therefore, citations included in patents can be (and have become widely) used to trace back knowledge flows –a specific type of relations. There are  procedures to attribute a geographical origin to the citation and consequently to interpret knowledge flows as originating from a particular location. Such measures would be relevant for the monitoring of the relations within ERA. However, they were not publicly available and scholars in R&D studies tended to produce subsets for specific purposes.

Given the target of the study, the production of data was restricted to references with at least one  university affiliation –university references from now onwards. University references might be both to patent literature and non-patent literature.

This analysis was performed on patents from the 27 EU Member States.