March Updates

This month, PatentsView released the third quarter of 2021 data complete with the new algorithm and data structure updates initiated last fall. The release notes web page holds detailed information on this release and historical releases.

Also released this month are annualized gender data files with new documentation and an updated data dictionary from the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). These datasets are designed for use in quick exploratory data analysis as well as read programmatically for more longitudinally focused data users. The annual files contain information from the assignee, inventor, location, application, and patent tables all in one place for a more comprehensive picture of patenting teams. In addition to pulling in variables from these separate PatentsView data tables, the datasets contain novel variables including the total number of inventors on a given patent, the total number of inventors listed on a given patent that were assigned a gender, the number of men inventors on each patent, the number of women inventors on each patent, and a flag for demonstrating whether inventor information is available for that patent.

To read more about these data files and the inspiration for their generation, visit the Gender & Innovation page and navigate to the DATA section located under the interactive visualization of gender data from 2000 to 2020.

Looking Ahead

The next PatentsView data update is gearing up this March and will result in a double release of 2021 quarter four and 2022 quarter one data come early-summer. The team is working with OCE this spring to improve and optimize the assignee disambiguation and gender attribution algorithms. The anticipated result of this dive into algorithm repair and improvement is higher quality data. As always, please reach out to our team with data questions and suggestions. Your exploration of the data and reporting of discrepancies and errors helps support our team to return the highest quality data to the public.

To receive regular updates on what the PatentsView team is working on in distributing patent data and reading about patenting literature, subscribe to our bi-monthly newsletter. Happy Spring!