The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance implications. One such feature that has received much attention is technological knowledge age. Yet, little is known about how the age of scientific knowledge influences the impact of inventions, despite the widely known catalyzing role of science in the creation of new technologies. Here we use a large corpus of patents and derive features characterizing how patents temporally search in the scientific space. We find that patents that cite scientific papers have more citations and substantially more likely to become breakthroughs. Conditional on searching in the scientific space, referencing more recent papers increases the impact of patents and the likelihood of being breakthroughs. However, this positive effect can be offset if patents cite papers whose ages exhibit a low variance. These effects are consistent across technological fields.

翻译：发明的发展在理论上被视作一种搜索和重组现有知识组件的过程。先前研究在此理论框架下考察了重组知识的众多特征及其对性能的影响。其中一个备受关注的特性是技术知识的年龄。然而，尽管科学在新技术的创造中具有众所周知的催化作用，但科学知识的年龄如何影响发明的冲击力却鲜为人知。本文利用一个大型专利语料库，推导出描述专利如何在科学空间中进行时间搜索的特征。我们发现，引用科学论文的专利获得更多引用，且成为突破性发明的可能性显著更高。在科学空间中进行搜索的条件下，引用更近期的论文会提升专利的影响力和成为突破性发明的可能性。然而，如果专利引用的论文年龄方差较低，这种积极效应可能会被抵消。这些效应在不同技术领域内表现一致。