Hello,

I am trying to determine whether the inventor_id associated with the file g_inventor_disambiguated truly corresponds to a single inventor. What I mean is that since there are names that clearly appear in more than one patent and in different locations, they may either represent the same person who has migrated or different individuals.

Sometimes, there are different inventor_ids associated with the same names, and sometimes not. To double-check this issue, I found a study by Jaffe et al. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/YRLSKU where they attempted to understand the ages of different inventors. They uploaded their final dataset to the link I provided. Using their dataset, I attempted to see if there are differences in terms of unique IDs. I tried various names, but I'll post here just "Daniel J. Williams":

The "Patents View" dataset shows 3 different inventor_ids associated with "Daniel J. Williams" and 12 different cities.

The Jaffe dataset shows 6 different IDs, although they were only able to find 3 corresponding birth years.

Finally, I checked on idiyas.com and found 6 instances of "Daniel J. Williams", which is more in line with Jaffe's findings. However, I'm unsure about the trustworthiness of this website.

Therefore, what I am trying to understand is:

Is a single inventor_id associated with a single inventor?
Do I have to use other files to find all single inventor_ids?
Are there unsolvable issues on this matter, making it impossible to find all single inventors?

Would you mind answering these questions?

Thanks,

Rick