I am interested in reproducing the statistics on the number of European patent applications per year, specifically focusing on cases where the country of residence of the first applicant is one of the EU-27 countries. (as shown there https://www.epo.org/about-us/annual-rep ... tions.html and also in Eurostat "Patent applications to the EPO by country of applicants and inventors (2004 and onwards; source: EPO)")
I have a couple of questions:
1) Is it possible to (easily) reproduce the statistics on the number of European patent applications reported in the annual statistics on the EPO website? If I understand correctly, the count of EP applications includes both direct EP applications and PCT applications using the EPO route, where the date of entry into the European phase is used (instead of the application filing date). It seems to me that determining the date of entry into the EP regional phase is not straightforward in PATSTAT although it's used to construct the aggregate shown on the EPO website.
Alternatively, I tried to extract the number of EP applications in PATSTAT Online (Spring 2023), using the query below.
Code: Select all
SELECT appln_filing_year, COUNT(*)
FROM tls201_appln AS a
JOIN tls207_pers_appln AS b
ON a.appln_id = b.appln_id
JOIN tls206_person AS s
ON b.person_id = s.person_id
WHERE appln_filing_year >= 2000 -- Define year range here
AND appln_auth = 'EP' AND applt_seq_nr = 1
AND s.person_ctry_code IN ('AT', 'BE', 'BG', 'HR', 'CY', 'CZ', 'DK', 'EE', 'FI', 'FR', 'DE', 'GR', 'HU', 'IE', 'IT', 'LV', 'LT', 'LU', 'MT', 'NL', 'PL', 'PT', 'RO', 'SK', 'SI', 'ES', 'SE')
GROUP BY a.appln_filing_year
ORDER BY a.appln_filing_year
3) I observed a difference between the number of EP applications extracted from the above query (around 50,000 per year for EU-27 applicants) and the count of EP applications published in the EPO annual report (ranging from 60,000 to 67,000 over the last decade). How can we explain this discrepancy of around 10,000 applications? I have read that the count in the annual report/Eurostat also includes withdrawn applications? Do these withdrawn applications appear in PATSTAT? Do they amount to around 10,000 EP application for EU-27 applicants, it seems to be a lot to me.
Thanks.
Alexis