Patent Citation with PATSTAT

[Econ2053]

Hello

I have to analyse patent data for my thesis and my supervisor gave me an excel sheet with PATSTAT data for all the relevant companies. I have never worked with PATSTAT or patents in general before, therefore everything is pretty new to me.
For the patent analysis I have to include the column "nb_citing_docdb_fam". What does this column tell me? Is it a forward/backward citation? If a patent was granted and has like 50 in the "nb_citing_docdb_fam" column what does that mean for the patent?

I'm sorry for all the question, but I couldn't find information anywhere else

[EPO / PATSTAT Support]

So what does the column "nb_citing_docdb_fam" mean? It is: "Number of distinct DOCDB simple families citing at least one of the publications or applications of the DOCDB simple family of the current application (search report citations from TLS212_CITATION)"

You will find this information (and much more) in the "Data Catalog" for PATSTAT Global, accessible from https://www.epo.org/searching-for-paten ... html#tab-3 .

Since you are new to the patent system(s), terms like "application", "publication" of "family" likely will confuse you. So the resources on our EPO webpage "First time here?" (https://www.epo.org/searching-for-paten ... -here.html) might help you.

Martin / EPO