"Applicants - Country" v. "Applicants" when filtering

Post Reply

Bradford
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Mar 12, 2020 3:18 pm

"Applicants - Country" v. "Applicants" when filtering

Post by Bradford » Thu Apr 09, 2020 10:58 am

With this query:-

cpc = "B82Y40/00" AND pd = "2018"

and with

Filters: Earliest publication date (family): 2018-01-01 To 2018-12-31

under “Applicants – Country”, “CN” appears 5th in the list with 79 documents (79 publications, which appear to belong to 55 families).

However, under “Applicants” the twenty or so named applicants appear almost all to be Chinese.

The numbers of families indicated for the named Chinese applicants (and the numbers of “documents”/”publications” in the families) seem to be far more in total than indicated for “CN” under “Applicants – Country”.

Can you help understand the apparent difference or discrepancy between the information provided by “Applicants – Country” and that provided by “Applicants”?

Many thanks in advance!


Patent Information Marketing
Posts: 358
Joined: Fri Mar 03, 2017 1:16 pm

Re: "Applicants - Country" v. "Applicants" when filtering

Post by Patent Information Marketing » Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:32 pm

Dear user,

Thank you for your post. Indeed, the number of Chinese applicants seem to be higher than the ones indicated when looking into the applicant country filter category. The reason is that the data provided by the different patent authority to the EPO does not always contain this information. It will only be captured in the applicant country filter category when this information has been provided. In such cases, you will see this indicated as [CN] (country code in square brackets []) next to the applicant’s name in the result list or the bibliographic data view.

Having a closer look at this particular case, it is obvious that some of this data is missing. In fact, none of the publications resulting from your query for the year 2018 with applicant country [CN] belong to CN publications but to US, WO, AU and EP publications, respectively. You can check this by actually applying the applicant country [CN] filter and you will not find a CN publication under the publication countries category on the top of the filter list.

In case you want to get a more detailed overview on our worldwide bibliographic data coverage you might want to consult the following forum post. It is a detailed analysis made by and for PATSTAT but it gives you an indication of the completeness for various bibliographic fields for different authorities in the respective year.

It has to mentioned that no database is ever really complete and the completeness of data received from the different authorities can vary. Please be assured that the EPO is, nevertheless, always striving to get as much as possible complete, correct and timely data from all possible sources and will continue to do so in the future.

We hope that this helps to explain the results you retrieved.
Kind regards

Patent Information Marketing


Post Reply