Policymakers recognize that expanding the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in patenting is critical for growing and sustaining American innovation and prosperity. The challenge is that demographic characteristics of inventors such as sex at birth, gender, ethnicity, and race are not collected as part of the process of applying for or receiving a patent. Join us to learn more about how this challenge is addressed through alternative approaches, the accuracy of various approaches, and the important uses of these statistics.

At PatentsView, with our partners at the University of Bordeaux, we have identified the gender of inventors named on U.S. patents from 1976 to 2021. By using the information supplied by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) from their World Gender-Name Dictionary along with other documentation, the team was able  to infer the gender for over 92.6% of the 2 million inventors residing in the United States and 92.3% of the nearly 5 million inventors named on U.S. patents residing around the world. You can download bulk data, as well as yearly data files, with gender information according to the latest algorithms for gender attribution on our website. The desire to map who is creating the latest technology is rapidly increasing. To be certain, this exploration is a global endeavor. 

You are invited to a day-long symposium on Friday, August 26th, to learn about the latest developments for identifying and analyzing the demographics of inventors who patent. The symposium will feature experts from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, ZestAI, RAND Corporation, Rutgers University, University of Bordeaux, and WIPO. To tie everything together, a capstone panel with practitioners and leaders from the financial industry and academic institutions will share their perspectives on the research, next steps, and the overall policy relevance of knowing who drives innovation through patenting.  

To read more about each presenter and their work, and to register for this symposium, please visit the PatentsView event page at patentsview.org/events/august26-2022. See you there!

A few months ago, our team announced a break in the quarterly data update cycle. This interruption  allowed us to standardize, consolidate, clean, and amplify our current resources across the bulk data download and API products.  

The bulk data downloads are currently comprised of more than 100 individual files. These files include disambiguated inventors, assignees, and locations, patent classification lookup tables, government interest information, long-text data and claims, and pre-granted patent application publications. The PatentsView team’s standardization and consolidation efforts aim to decrease barriers to merging these files. Part of this process targets data fields and table structures across the granted patent and pre-granted publications datasets. The standardization will also include updating PatentsView’s naming conventions for USPC and CPC fields to map closer to United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) naming conventions.  

Data update processes resume this month with an anticipated release this September. The September update will include data released by USPTO in between January and June 2022.  

Since one goal of the API redesign is to mirror the data available in the bulk data downloads, our team is continuing to increase the number of endpoints and data fields accessible through the beta Elastic Search API. With the September data update, we plan to release all remaining granted patent data currently not available in the MySQL API but available in the downloaded data (i.e. gender, botanic, long-text description fields, applicants, etc.). We will release pre-grant patent publications’ data and endpoints by the end of the year. 

As always, we welcome and appreciate your feedback and communication with our team. Our email inbox and feedback form are open; we strive to respond to messages within two business days. To ask questions or start a conversation within the PatentsView user community, please see the Forum available on our website. 

P.S. Here’s a quick note: Our Query Builder tool was supposed to remain available during this time of data product harmonization, but because of new Google email regulations on APIs, we are currently unable to return your datasets via email. We are seeking a solution to this issue and will keep you posted. In the interim, if you require a dataset from the Query Builder, please reach out to our team for guidance.  

Updates on our tools, website, and upcoming events

It’s springtime in the United States, the season for growth and change. Our work at PatentsView continues to move ahead; with our growing user base and data team, we are trying new things and exercising our creativity. This can be seen on our Gender & Innovation topic page which now features an interactive data visualization made by some of our team members using PatentsView data. Also new to the topic page are annualized data files made in partnership with USPTO data scientists. These annual files are yearly and contain disambiguated information on patents, their assignees, inventors, and inventor gender. Smaller, more malleable data packages are a new thing for us – so let us know what you think!

Tools

The Query Builder, PatentSearch API, and legacy API are up to date with 2021 quarter 4 data from USPTO (data through December 30, 2021) as of March 28, 2022. The PatentsView team has been working to create additional endpoints in the new PatentSearch API (version 0.1) which will eventually replace the legacy API interface for PatentsView data. To date, over 100 beta users are engaging with the PatentSearch API. Our team is appreciative of the feedback we have received so far and look forward to additional improvements and additions as the year progresses.  

Data Updates

The bulk data download tables are still the biggest and most exhaustive collection of raw and processed data that our team has to offer. We monitor for updates to disambiguation methods and algorithms so that we can continue to improve the disambiguation of location, inventor, assignee, and lawyer information. It also helps us to improve when users of PatentsView data share errors they find in disambiguated results with our team – so, thank you, it really does make PatentsView stronger.

Our next data update will publish in September 2022 and include quarters 1 and 2 of data for 2022. The PatentsView data science team is taking a break from data update activities through the months April to July to devote all resources toward making planned structural changes to the bulk data download and API products we offer. The next communication from our team will outline these structural changes and how this may affect bulk data download and API users.

During this four-month period, the data available from the API(s) and Query Builder functions will also remain up to date through December 30, 2021. All PatentsView features will be updated in September with data through June 30, 2022.

Upcoming Events

PatentsView, with support from AIR, is hosting the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Gender and Race Attribution Symposium in August 2022. The symposium is a full-day virtual event aimed to bring together computer scientists, information scientists, economists, and others to discuss the state-of-the-art approaches to and current applications of name-to-gender and name-to-race attribution algorithms. The symposium will review methods and applications to provide an overview of current approaches from leading scholars in the field, and to build knowledge, identify a community of practitioners, and facilitate the application of common approaches. Stay tuned for the save the date announcement from our team!

Who are the creative thinkers behind the latest innovations?

Patenting is an evolving and informative phenomenon. Patenting rates are subject to the ebbs and flows of the financial economy, the devastation of natural disasters, and changes in the labor force (think World Wars and women leaving the home for the workplace). Research on patents, their inventors and owners is expansive and covers the entire world because, beyond what is being created and imagined, patenting has as much to do with the circumstances inventors face as it does with ingenuity.   

We know of some classic examples, those famous around the world for their inventions that changed our daily lives and possibly the trajectory of humankind. After all, where would we be without the electricity (thank you, Alessandro Volta, Italy) that allows us to work day and night in the name of productivity? Veiled Marxism and broad brushstrokes aside, the subsequent inventions that harnessed the power of Volta’s discovery (Thomas Edison, USA and Joseph Swan, UK) expanded the number of hours in the day that people were able to be awake, active, and creating – a history-altering impact on civilization in pursuit of industrialization. The American inventor Thomas Edison had over one thousand patents in his name and spent much of his later life inventing fulltime in laboratories with other American inventors of the period including the division-of-labor transformer, Henry Ford. During these prolific years in Edison’s life, his home and children were tended by his first wife, Mary (married in 1871 until her death in 1884), and second wife, Mina (married in 1886).

Since 1790, the year U.S. law changed to allow women to own intellectual property, only twenty women had patents under their names in the United States patenting office by 1840 (source). Over the next century and a half, women inventor rates steadily increased, accelerated by their movement out of traditional home-related tasks and into higher education systems and workplaces. One such inventor, Grace Hopper (1906-1992), was the first woman to graduate from Yale University with a PhD in Mathematics (1934) and in the 1950s she created the computer language COBOL, Common Business-Oriented Language. Hopper’s COBOL is still used today in business, administration, and finance operations for companies and governments. Hopper did not own a patent on COBOL as it was created before computer software technology was a patentable field of invention, another tribute to the changes in the U.S. patenting system. From the single patent filed by a woman inventor in 1804 to the thousands of women inventors in the U.S. patent system today, something massive has changed. In no small part, that massive change reflects a shift in the culture of the United States and beyond.

We know from gender attribution algorithms used by researchers around the world that patenting rates are still not at parity (equal proportions) between men- and women-inventors despite the percentages of men and women being roughly equal in the world. Perhaps the patenting “playing field” is still leveling out after hundreds of years of differential opportunities, or perhaps there are new barriers to inventing today that prohibit some groups of people from creating at full “Edisonian capacity.”

Entering this new millennium, patenting researchers are delving into the who of inventorship more than ever in the hopes of unlocking and supporting the next wave of innovation worldwide. Here at PatentsView, our team of developers, data scientists, and social science researchers are working together to bring the latest breakthroughs in disambiguation and attribution science to the public. After a summertime of doubling down on disambiguation algorithms and amping up on gender attribution efforts with our partners, PatentsView is closer than ever to the latest information on who is inventing.

Part of the PatentsView mission is to deliver the best data we can as efficiently as we can. In this spirit, we are redesigning the application programming interface (API) to our database. The goal of the redesign is to allow for faster query results and a simplified querying mechanism. For more information on the API redesign, please visit this link.

Want to explore gender data further? You can access our latest gender attribution data in the inventor table under bulk data downloads. Reference the data dictionary to see the variables we have for use in the inventor table. To investigate where inventors are patenting from, use the Query Builder tool or write script to chat with the API for the “last known location” field. What are you investigating with the help of PatentsView data this season? We’d love to know.

Since our last data update, PatentsView data scientists and developers have been hard at work rewriting disambiguation algorithms and streamlining our data pipeline processes for smoother and more replicable update cycles in future months and years to come. With this latest update, which includes patent data through March 30, 2021, we are now two full update cycles into use of our revised algorithms for disambiguating data. For more information on data changes, please visit our release notes page.

As the data sets get larger and more complex and as new fields and attributes are added to the PatentsView database, our servers, domains, and other hardware must also be upgraded to continue to support our work. Our latest upgrade is the PatentsView application programming interface (affectionately known as the API). The legacy API served 3,000–300,000 requests every day. While a majority of these requests succeed, over the past few years the number of requests that fail has increased due to the size of the data sets. To address this and to stay up to date with industry standards, PatentsView has begun the process of redesigning the API.

For more information about API changes, please read on.

API Redesign

Design Goals

• Enable a search-centric approach to the API rather than a querying/filter-based approach.
• Achieve response times in range of seconds rather than minutes.
• Improve user experience by limiting number and size of individual API requests from the server.
• Align the API design with industry standards in terms of request and response format, headers, and documentation.

v0.1

The technology and design choices for the new PatentSearch API were made with the above goals in mind. The v0.1 PatentSearch API will apply this approach to a narrow scope of patent citations and application citations. As a result, the corresponding fields in the legacy API, shown below, will be discontinued.

Discontinued Fields

New PatentSearch API Fields

Patent Citation Endpoint

Application Citation Endpoint

Changes

To achieve the design goals related to performance, the scope of the citations’ endpoint has been reduced, as outlined below.

1. Patent Fields

What has changed: Patent-related information such as patent title, patent type, patent kind, etc., will not be available in the citations’ endpoint.

How this affects users: API clients will need to make two requests, one to the citations’ endpoint to obtain the patent numbers and a second to the patent’s endpoint to get the patent-related information.

2. Citedby and Cited Patents

What has changed: Previously, users were able to send a patent number (or other queries) and obtain patent numbers that cite the requested patent (called forward citations) as well as the patent numbers that the requested patent has cited (called backward citations). With the new PatentSearch API, users will only be able to obtain patent numbers that the requested patent has cited (i.e., backward citations).

How this affects users: API clients will need to send two requests:

• once with the patent numbers of interest in the “patent_number” field to get the list of patents that the requested patent has cited (i.e., backward citations); and
• again with patent numbers of interest in the “cited_patent_number” field to get the list of patents that cite the requested patent number (i.e., forward citations).

Bulk Requests

To support the above changes, the new citations PatentSearch API and the legacy API will both support a “bulk” request wherein API clients can send up to 1,000 values in either patent number field. The maximum number of patents that can be sent will depend on the mechanism of request (POST vs. GET), and this maximum will be revisited at the end of the pilot phase.

What Else Is New?

PatentSearch API documentation will be released along with the v0.1 public release. A summary of the changes are as follows:

• Developers will need to obtain an API key to access the API.
• Each API key will be allowed 45 requests per minute.
• GET request format remains unchanged.
• POST requests will need to send JSON data (instead of string representation of JSON).
• The response from the server will have the following:
• an “error” field indicating if the request resulted in an error;
• X-Status-Reason and X-Status-Reason-Code in case of an error; and
• Retry-After header in case of throttled requests.

Timeline

Aug. 1: Citations Endpoints API (v0.1) released to pilot users

Sept. 1: Citations Endpoints API (v0.1) released to public users

Last year was amazing for PatentsView. In spite of the difficult, uncertain, and changing world brought on by the global coronavirus pandemic, our team was able to successfully transition to working exclusively online. We send a heartfelt thank you to the thousands of scientists and innovators across the globe, and their upstream suppliers, for developing life-saving vaccines that bring hope back to our communities.

We are happy to inform everyone that the API querying parameters are being improved to better meet the needs of our users (follow the link for more information about changes to the API). We have also updated the algorithms for data disambiguation based on developments in the field of entity resolution and based on feedback from our PatentsView user community. Our disambiguated inventor data are now linked to our gender attribution results. The table includes a flag for inventors identified as male and an attribution status flag for all inventors. Also, for the first time, the raw gender attribution data are available on our download page.

Our patentsview.org website and community pages have a new domain, with an updated look and feel. With this fresh start, the bulk data download webpages are now searchable by table. The data dictionaries for our Query Builder tool and Bulk Data Download Tables are also integrated into our webpages and fully searchable. Happily, PGPubs data is out of its beta form! The Bulk Data Download Tables are available for granted patents and pre-granted published patent applications (PGPubs). Among other additions to the PatentsView web environment are detailed reference materials for all PatentsView methods and processes, as well as dedicated topic pages. Our first topic page, called Gender & Innovation, focuses on the participation of women as inventors on patents. Future topics may include innovation around COVID-19, trends in AI (artificial intelligence) patenting, and other topics of interest to our data scientists and user community (email us sometime if you have an idea for a page topic).

If you have questions or interests to share, please use the community forum and data-in-action features that have been integrated into the newly redesigned website. If you are working on a project or using PatentsView data for another purpose you would like to share, please email us to be featured on our Data in Action Spotlight page. These Data in Action articles will also be highlighted on the PatentsView homepage.

Our PatentsView team also assisted the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by hosting the virtual USPTO Symposium on Entity Resolution. The symposium included presentations from researchers and applied experts on entity resolution methods and practices from around the world. There were insightful questions and discussion among the 15 panel presenters and over 100 participants, and we are grateful to everyone who joined. Background articles, presentation slides, and recordings of the symposium are available at: https://patentsview.org/entityres.

With all these amazing improvements there are bound to be challenges and difficulties. Please communicate with us via our contact form or email when you encounter an issue with our webpage or data. As always, we continue to improve our systems, documentation, and communications, so don’t be shy—let us know your feedback.

Happiness and health to all of you!

Sincerely,

The PatentsView Team

Chris Baker, data scientist at the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation, developed the patentsview R package that is a wrapper around the PatentsView API. It contains a function that acts as a client to the API (search_pv()) as well as several supporting functions. Full documentation of the package can be found on its website.

The library offers ways to query the API, process the data, and develop visualizations to track interesting patterns in patenting activity. For analysis examples that go into a little more depth, check out the data applications vignettes on the package's website.

The R Open Science blog has more details.