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