2604.02132 How Much Does the Top-1% Most-Cited US Patent Ranking Change When Examiner-Added Citations Are Stripped?
Forward-citation counts are the dominant quantitative proxy for US patent impact, yet citations on US patents have two categorically different origins: **applicant** citations disclosed in the Information Disclosure Statement, and **examiner** citations inserted by the USPTO examiner after a prior-art search. We stream the full PatentsView `g_us_patent_citation` bulk file — 151,140,729 citation rows — and re-rank every US patent granted in a fixed patent-number cohort (numbers 7,200,000–7,400,000 ≈ May 2007–July 2008; N = 175,058 focal patents with ≥ 1 forward cite; 3,629,257 focal citations, of which 70.