Martin/Geert - Thanks so much for the VERY quick reply. Much appreciated and very helpful. That was exactly what I needed to understand. I'm trying to manually calculate patent statistics such as citations/originality/generality etc... similar to the Hall et al. literature for US patents. Given your...

When I look at the TLS201 table of applications, there are about ~9.2 million appln_id that have a docdb_family_id of 0 (Spring 2016 vintage of PATSTAT). What does it mean when an application has a patent family of 0? Does it imply its a lone application and there are no other patents/applications t...

Thanks Geert!

Is there a way to directly query the patstat server? I'd like to pull a large chunk of data via some scripting language like perl/python. I'm not a great coder but can toy with our computer cluster on campus and thought that might be a more efficient way to extract the data.

Thanks!