 Patent trend analysis: Incorporate current year dataMichael P. Bigwood World Patent Information, 1997, vol. 19, issue 4, 243-249 Abstract: Patent trend analysis, a statistical analysis of the rate of publication of patents pertaining to a certain field or assigned to a certain company, provides information about technology maturity and corporate technology strategies. Typically, the analysis is performed by counting in an online database the number of patents issued annually in a set of calendar years. This means that the analysis can only be performed up to the year for which all the patents have been captured in the database. In order to obtain a quantitative estimate of that lag time, we have analyzed the rate at which patents are being added to Derwent's World Patent Index database. We found that most patents issued in a given year are captured in the database by March of the following year. We also found that the rate of addition of patents to the database is a linear function of time. Not only does this allow completion of a patent trend analysis to the current date, it actually allows, under certain conditions, the extrapolation of the analysis to the end of the current year. Date: 1997 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:worpat:v:19:y:1997:i:4:p:243-249 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article World Patent Information is currently edited by Michael Blackman More articles in World Patent Information from Elsevier |
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