  Traditionally, the number of citations that a scholarly paper receives from
other papers is used as the proxy of its scientific impact. Yet citations can
come from domains outside the scientific community, and one such example is
through patented technologies---paper can be cited by patents, achieving
technological impact. While the scientific impact of papers has been
extensively studied, the technological aspect remains less known in the
literature. Here we aim to fill this gap by presenting a comparative study on
how 919 thousand biomedical papers are cited by U.S. patents and by other
papers over time. We observe a positive correlation between citations from
patents and from papers, but there is little overlap between the two domains in
either the most cited papers, or papers with the most delayed recognition. We
also find that the two types of citations exhibit distinct temporal variations,
with patent citations lagging behind paper citations for a median of 6 years
for the majority of papers. Our work contributes to the understanding of the
technological impact of papers.
