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csma
Last seen: 08/29/2023 - 23:07
Joined: 05/22/2022 - 13:33
what does citation_date imply in the g_us_patent_citation file?

 

Hello, I was wondering if I could get some help regarding with the dataset.

 g_us_patent_citation file is as follows

patent_id    citation_sequence    citation_patent_id    citation_date
D380652    12                                   4865237                      1989-09-01
 

Does this mean the patent D380652 cited the patent 4865237 on 1989-09-01?

Or, the patent D380652 cited the patent 4865237 which was granted on 1989-09-01?

 

I thought the latter is correct but I just realized sometime citation_patent_id has different citation_date like this

patent_id    citation_sequence    citation_patent_id    citation_date
8113469       8                                   4865271                        1989-09-01    
5354017       7                                   4865271                       1989-12-01    
 

So I am bit confused. Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

Thank you.

Sat, 08/26/2023 - 09:22
Russ
Last seen: 03/21/2024 - 09:05
Joined: 11/14/2017 - 22:15
understandable confusion

The citation date field sort of refers to the issue date of the patent being cited.  The problem is that in the underlying source xml, only the month and year of the issue date is given, the date is specified as 00.  Look at the xml in https://patentsview.org/forum/7/topic/257#comment-282 patent 1963218 is being sited with a citation date of 19340600, 1963218 was really issued 1934-06-19.  Take a look at the citations in the pdf of D380652, they only show the month and year of when the cited patent was issued. Patentsview seems to set the date portion of all the citation dates to 1 to make them valid dates.  

In your first example, 4865237 has a citation date of 1989-09-01 but its issue date was really 1989-09-12.  In your second example, 4865271 was issued 1989-09-12 so the first citation has the right citation date (though that's a terrible name for the field!).  The second citation seems to have what amounts to a typo in its citation date.  As I mentioned in that earlier post, I've seen all sorts of errors in the citation data.  

I hope you aren't more confused than when you started out!
Russ Allen

Sun, 08/27/2023 - 21:29
csma
Last seen: 08/29/2023 - 23:07
Joined: 05/22/2022 - 13:33
  Thank you very much! This…

 

Thank you very much! This is very helpful.