STEM Doctoral Graduates and Inventive Activities in European Countries (DOC-TRACK)

DOC-TRACK is a collaborative research project that brings together researchers from several European countries to study how doctoral graduates contribute to science and innovation. Using data from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, the project links doctoral dissertations to scientific publications and patents and offers a new perspective on the role of PhD training in technological change.

When people think about the contribution of doctoral graduates to innovation, they often think of patents. But this view is too narrow. New evidence from the DOC-TRACK project suggests that PhD graduates contribute to technological progress much more often through scientific publications than through direct patenting.

The report links doctoral dissertations from seven European countries to publication and patent data and shows two striking patterns. First, publishing during the PhD has become the norm for a large and growing share of graduates. Depending on the country and cohort, around half to four-fifths of doctoral graduates already publish during their doctoral studies, with France at particularly high levels and Italy showing a strong upward trend over time.

Second, many of these publications are connected to the technological frontier. The report defines this frontier through patents that cite scientific work either directly or through citation chains. Using this approach, it finds that an increasing share of doctoral graduates have at least one publication from the PhD period that is connected to a patent.

These findings indicate that direct patenting activities capture only a small part of doctoral graduates’ contribution to innovation. The share of graduates who appear as inventors on EPO patents is much smaller than the share whose publications are linked to patents. The report therefore shows that doctoral training contributes to innovation not only by producing inventors, but also by producing knowledge that later becomes useful for invention.

The full DOC-TRACK final technical report is available here: STEM Doctoral Graduates and Inventive Activities in European Countries (DOC-TRACK)