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3 posts
lemos
Last seen: 06/23/2020 - 10:08
Joined: 06/17/2020 - 04:19
Industry/Category of Patents

Hello all.

I want to filter for patents for a given industry. Although I see multiple fields with the name "category", none of them seem to be able to identify the related industry of a patent.

Is there a way to identify the industry that a patent comes from?

For example, I tried to retrieve the "cpc" fields (category, group_title, section_id) related to a bunch of patents, and all I get in return are NA's. Is this normal?

Btw, I am using R for this.

Thank you for your assistance

Miguel

 

Wed, 06/17/2020 - 04:37
lemos
Last seen: 06/23/2020 - 10:08
Joined: 06/17/2020 - 04:19
INDUSTRY/CATEGORY OF PATENTS

CPC fields are not NA... R played a trick on me.

But my question still stands. How to clearly identify to which industry does a patent belongs?

Wed, 06/17/2020 - 12:18
PVTeam
Role: moderator
Last seen: 04/26/2024 - 10:39
Joined: 10/17/2017 - 10:47
INDUSTRY/CATEGORY OF PATENTS

Hi Miguel,

Thank you for reaching out to us with this question! The best way to determine the industry to which a given patent belongs is to use the cpc_current table. The level of specificity you are interested in will determine which field you should pay attention to. The section_id column, for instance, will tell you which one of nine classification types a patent belongs to; A = Human Necessities, B = Performing Operations; Transporting, etc.

For more detailed information, you can next look at the subsection_id. A subsection of A01 would refer to an agriculture related patent. Similarly, the group_id and subgroup_id columns will give you incrementally more specific information on the patent. If you would like a general idea of what industry a patent belongs to, our suggestion would be to look at the subsection_id and to join the cpc_current and cpc_subsection tables on this field. For each patent in the cpc_current table this will tell you which of the 136 subsections they belong to. You can use the same process with group_id and subgroup_id using the cpc_group and cpc_subgroup tables respectively.

More information about the CPC classifications can be found here: https://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/cpc/html/cpc.html 

and all CPC tables can be downloaded here: https://www.patentsview.org/download/

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Best,

PVTeam