PatentsView provides researchers, inventors, and others with easy-to-use patent data and award-winning visualizations. This data helps people to discover trends, identify gaps, and recommend policy changes to improve patent and intellectual property systems. As the platform’s popularity grows, people are finding new ways to manipulate and analyze PatentsView data to achieve their goals.

For instance, author Raj Bridgelall used PatentsView data to conduct a systematic patent review (SPR) to analyze the how innovation was advancing in the field of transportation in a recent Future Transportation article titled “A Systematic Patent Review of Connected Vehicle Technology Trends.” Specifically, the review found that patents related to vehicle deployments were focused in the areas of improving safety and secure wireless communications.

What is SPR?

SPR is a methodological framework that Bridgelall adapted from the systematic literature review (SLR) method. In the paper, he says that “SPR offers detailed insights into both the thematic and temporal trajectories of innovation in any technology field.”

The SPR borrows from the SLR framework in its method of collecting data, selecting relevant information for analysis, and analyzing and interpreting the data with key themes and a focused objective in mind. However, where SLR typically centers qualitative methods to analyze titles and abstracts, SPR also incorporates a quantitative approach that relies on how frequently specific terms are used.

Bridgelall used PatentsView data, among other sources, to identify 220 U.S. patents from 2018-2022 related to automotive technology. His review separated them into categories, such as computing resources, cyber security, and driving safety. He found that patents are increasingly focused on driving safety and wireless communications, which he said, “aligns with broader goals of enhancing safety and situational awareness in transportation.”

The Benefits of SPR

In the paper, Bridgelall writes that most studies related to innovation in automotive technology are focused on technological aspects of the work and practical applications. His review provides a broader analysis that he says will help researchers identify gaps in the existing research and pinpoint areas for potential future innovation.

This research can also help policymakers understand where changes in policy and standardization might have an impact on the field. For instance, Bridgelall highlighted a 2020 move by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that repurposed a large portion of a safety band dedicated to vehicle use. Bridgelall said that doing so caused uncertainty and stalled investments in connected vehicle technology, which has “the potential to reduce accidents, optimize traffic flow, and enhance the driving experience by communicating with each other (V2V) and with everything else (V2X).”

He hopes that his introduction of the SPR methodology will lay the groundwork for future research by himself and others to expand upon his analysis and identify international and long-term trends.

You can download the full paper on mdpi.com using the link above.