  There is recurrent debate about how useful science is for technological
development, but we know little about what kinds of science are more useful for
technology. This paper fills this gap in the literature by exploring how the
value of a patent (as measured by patent forward citations and the stock market
response to the issuing of the patent) depends on the characteristics of the
scientific papers that it builds on, specifically, basicness,
interdisciplinarity, novelty, and scientific citations. Using a dataset of
33,337 USPTO biotech utility patents and their 860,879 in-text references to
Web of Science journal articles, we find (1) a positive effect of the number of
referenced scientific papers, (2) an inverted U-shaped effect of basicness, (3)
an insignificant effect of interdisciplinarity, (4) a discontinuous and
nonlinear effect of novelty, and (5) a positive effect of scientific citations
for patent market value but an insignificant effect on patent citations. In
addition, in-text referenced papers have a higher chance of being listed on the
front-page of the same patent when they are moderately basic, less
interdisciplinary, less novel, and more highly cited. Accordingly, using
front-page reference yields substantially different results than using in-text
references.
