The count filtering by publication

[ming]

HI：

I have some questions regarding the results of "filter by family" and "filter by publication" functions.

Using the example of "nftxt = 'Variable tooth coulter blade with sized inserts'", there are 4 families:

Question 1: When filtering by publication and choosing Country EP，If both the earliest publication and subsequent publication meet the query conditions, will they be counted separately or combined?

Question 2: When filtering by publication and choosing Country EP, the count is 1. However, when I checked the patent family, I found EP3242542A1, EP3242542A4, and EP3242542B1. I'm confused why the count is not 3.

Thank you

[Patent Information Marketing]

Dear user,

Thank you for your questions. I will answer directly to your second question because the explanations to the example provided should also give you the answer to your first question. As you mentioned it, filtering on publication level requires some further explanation to understand the results.

In the example provided, the publications EP3242542A1, EP3242542A4 and EP3242542B1, which correspond to a same application (EP16735244A), meet individually all search criteria. So, yes, in theory, you are right, we could expect to have a count of 3 for the filter item EP when filtering on publication level. The “publication” count in Espacenet, however, corresponds to a number of publication “records” rather than a number of “publications”. The underlying database of Espacenet is indeed structured in such a way today that data corresponding to the publications of a same application are gathered in a same record as long as there is no full-text (i.e. character-coded description and/or claims) available for any of the publications. But as soon as more than one publication has a full-text indexed in the database, the record is split in a number of records, which corresponds to the number of publications with available full-text. In this case, EP3242542A1 and EP3242542A4 have no full-texts of their own (the one displayed is indeed from the PCT (WO) document). Only EP3242542B1 has full-text. Therefore, there is only 1 publication “record”.

If you look at this other example: pn=CN110452742, there are 3 CN110452742 publications, CN110452742A, CN110452742B and CN110452742B8, which correspond to the same application (CN201910833265A) and meet individually the search criteria. Again, when filtering for the country item CN, we would expect to have a count of 3. However, the result is 2 because only CN110452742A and CN110452742B have available full-text.

We understand the inconvenience of this aspect and would, therefore, recommend to use PATSTAT (e.g. PATSTAT Online) if you want to do statistical analyses for patent intelligence purposes. The primary function of the filters in Espacenet is above all to apply or exclude filter items as explained in the help section Apply, exclude or remove filters.