Dear all,

first of all apologies for asking a probably fairly straight forward question -  I have just spent about an hour trying to find the answer myself both on this site as well as the USPTO's site but was somehow unable to find it.

I am working on a research paper for which I would like to use the classifications of patents in one of my analyses. My question is whether the sequence in which these classifications (may it be USPC or CPC) are reported can be interpreted in any way or, to be more specific, whether the first classification can be interpreted as the primary classification (compared to the other classification then resembling secondary classifications)? My question is inspired by the fact that the PatentsView datasets report the sequence of classification categories as a data point but the glossary does not contain any information on its meaning (https://patentsview.org/download/data-download-dictionary).

Many thanks in advance for your support (and also for providing all this data, that is tremendously helpful)!

Best,

Mk93