The college-level data needed for empirical research comes from various sources including the Chinese University Patent Big Data Public Service Platform, the National Natural Science Foundation Query System (GoingPub), the official website of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, the global patent search and analysis database (PatSnap) and the latest data released by colleges and government websites. The description of conditional and resultant variables, as well as data sources, are shown in Table 1.
