EPO - Discussion forums

Hi All,

Could someone please provide guidance regarding which tables and respective attributes I could use to estimate application backlog at a given national patent office? For example, how can I count the number of applications under active examination as well as the number of applications for which work has been completed in a given year (i.e withdrawn, denied or granted patent)? I reckon I should be able to utilize the legal status information in tables tls802_legal_event_code and tls221_inpadoc_prs to identify the different stages in an application's lifecycle, but I would really appreciate more detailed guidance in the event someone has done this already.

Thank you in advance!

V.

Hello Vlad,
with the present PATSTAT edition is is not possible to do that in an easy way. The only option I would see is to analyse the appropriate legal status codes in the tls221_inpadoc_prs table. The problem is that different countries use different codes.
Here is a sample query that will give you the EP patents that have been refused, revoked or withdrawn:

SELECT TOP 1000 appln_auth
,appln_nr
,appln_kind
,appln_filing_date
,appln_filing_year
,tls221_inpadoc_prs.prs_code
,prs_gazette_date
,lec_descr
FROM tls201_appln join tls221_inpadoc_prs on tls201_appln.appln_id = tls221_inpadoc_prs.appln_id
join tls802_legal_event_code on tls221_inpadoc_prs.lec_id = tls802_legal_event_code.lec_id
where prs_code in ('18R','27W','18W')
order by tls201_appln.appln_id

The prs_gazette_date can be used to see when the event happened (or did not happen yet).
To do this kind of research in a comprehensive way for all patent authorities will be a major task. You will need to check the various legal status codes that might be of relevance for your study.
Here you will find a list of the legal status codes: http://www.epo.org/searching/data/data/ ... gular.html Check for the xsl "Categorisation of recently used legal status codes"

In the near future we will also have the "European Patent Register for PATSTAT" . That database has a "status" attribute that make it easier to extract (EP) patents according to their "status".