Hi,
I am trying to understand the patterns in citations. I am looking at the uspatentcitation.tsv file. One of the fields I am especially interested in the who did the citation, "category". I have taken the first 1M rows as a test. The entries in the field include: "cited by applicant","cited by examiner","cited by other", "cited by third party", and "NULL".
What is confusing me is the number of cases where "cited by other" is the entry. In my experience with patents I do not often run into cases with non-applicant or non-examiner prior art citations. That experience is limited and is the very high frequency actual? Or am I misunderstanding the meaning of that term?
I am just making sure I understand what the data means.
Thanks
Andy