Patent Mining and Analytical approaches and their impact on the outcome of statistical patent analysis

Many patent analysis are performed on the basis of US data, as the US market is the most important technology market in the world. Therefore substantial changes in the technological activities in the US, such as the end of the new economy boom, have aconsiderable worldwide impact (Legler et al. 2008). A further reason for the frequent reference to US patents traces back to the fact that the first electronic patent data bases were available for US patents (see e.g. Campell and Nieves 1979 or Carpenter et al. 1980), so there is a well-established tradition of patent analysis of US data.

Patent analysis should be made with reference to the first years of application, i.e., priority years, to achieve an appropriate link to other innovation indicators. In any case, it is important for patent analyses that the first priority year is used as timereference and that only pre-grant publications are considered. By including grants without pre-publication the analysed samples can be increased, but the consequenceis a decrease of application numbers in recent years which cannot be interpreted in arational way. Full Article