Inventor sequence number pre-2005

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Rachie
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Nov 16, 2015 2:13 am

Inventor sequence number pre-2005

Post by Rachie » Wed Mar 16, 2016 10:59 pm

The data catalogue contains a couple notes about how inventor sequence numbers are inaccurate from 1971-2005:
OECD patents database for US data post 1976-01-01 up to and including November 15th 2005 for Published Grants. This data does not contain sequence numbers, so they are allocated within PATSTAT.

For US data : Documents published after 1976-01-01: For the inventors , the sequence numbers are all given arbitrarily, with the exception of the documents published after March 2005, where the sequence numbers are all correct.
Can anyone clarify what exactly this means? How exactly are sequence numbers "allocated within PATSTAT", and what does "arbitrary" mean in this case? Are the numbers assigned randomly? Alphabetically?


mkracker
Posts: 120
Joined: Wed Sep 04, 2013 6:17 am
Location: Vienna

Re: Inventor sequence number pre-2005

Post by mkracker » Thu Mar 17, 2016 4:19 pm

In case of multiple inventors, the inventors are printed on the publication in some order. Whether this order carries any business significance, is up to the publishing office.

Nevertheless, PATSTAT retains this order information by assigning sequence numbers to these inventors (cf. tables TLS207_PERS_APPLN and TLS227_PERS_PUBLN). The first inventor gets INVT_SEQ_NR = 1, the next inventor number 2 and so on.

However, in the case of inventors published by the USPTO before 2005 we simply do not have this information. Still, for the sake of consistency, PATSTAT assigns sequence numbers 1, 2, ... to these inventors. But these assignments are random, so you definitely cannot infer any business meaning from them.
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Martin Kracker / EPO


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