EPO - Discussion forums

Dear EPO

I'm currently writing my master thesis, in which I would like to use "number of granted patents for Company X at time T" as a variable. However, I have no knowledge in SQL etc, and would like to know if it is possible to find this information via your online services?

In other words, I have a list of companies and I would like to know how many granted/issued patents they had/have at a certain date. Is this possible? (OBS, US companies) I really appreciate your help.

Best regards,

Thesiswriter

Hi Thesiswriter,

First, I am just a normal user, not representing the EPO.

espacenet has this type of searching capabilities.
Here is an example searching for HP patents (just an example).
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/searchRe ... =&CPC=&IC=

You can enter different data to obtain the information that you need:
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/advanced ... cale=en_EP

However, if you need to do this on a large scale may I suggest that you take a look at the google patents service.

Here is a similar request there:
https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Hewlett-Packard+Co
This gives 28,394 patents

If you expand the search form you can control all kinds of things like the inventor, filling status, priority date etc. I think they cover everything that you need.

And also, because the API is RESTful you can built the urls in something like excel and create your links easily with simple concatenation so that you have a large body of data gathered quickly that you can then use in your analysis.

Good luck with your thesis!

Thank you,
Radu-Cristian Ioanitescu