EPO - Discussion forums

Dear Madam/Sir,

i m PhD student and nowadays working with patents.
My focused is to identify all patents with at least one inventor from Brussels for period of 1990-2015.
I did a double search in order to get all information.
The first search method i used option of searching by city name with different variations of Brussels spelling in Patstat. Some how i got only patents from USPTO office.

For the second method i used search by country code BE, and with inventor addresses i searched Brussels (all spelling variations) and also include postal code and municipalities of Brussels. I got data from EPO and USPTO, but number of observations from USPTO were way less as i received from my first method of search. However, i compared data from USPTO and merged to data sets with excluding duplicates.
My questions are:

where i can find information at least about Brussels patents?
How i can check reliability of my data?
and if there any specialist who can make a look to my simple outcome from my data?

thank you very much for any suggestion or help

Best regards,
Palina

Dear Palina,
what PATSTAT platform are you using ? Online or installed on a local server ?
One has to keep in mind that address data is only available for a limited number of patent offices.
Specific for inventors (as opposed to applicants): they sometimes ask to NOT have their name and address published on the patent document in which case it will not be available in the databases neither.
Coverage is good for EP & US applications, sketchy at best for other authorities.
Maybe you could publish your search strategy (SQL ?) so that other users can have a look in detail at your approach and come up with ideas to improve.
About the specialist opinion: this forum is the best way to reach them, but the EPO does not have the resources to analyse specific data sets.

Dear Geert,

thank you for your reply. With SQL i already had some suggestions and improvements. I was just wondering how much patents i can loose with searching by address in order to have clear idea about number of patents with at least one inventor from Brussels.

Best regards,
Palina

Please have a look at the OECD REGPAT database. Use region code BE10 or BE100 for Brussels.