Unique inventors names identification problem

[knikonor]

Hello to all colleagues,

does anybody faced (and maybe solved) the old-known problem with identification
of unique inventors names in PATSTAT?

The problem is also named "John Smith" problem.
It was discussed in the article "THE “NAMES GAME”: HARNESSING INVENTORS’
PATENT DATA FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH":

http://www.nber.org/papers/w12479

8 years past since this publication. Maybe there are some another approaches for that?

Regards,
Kirill.

[nico.rasters]

http://www.esf-ape-inv.eu/ is supposed to deal with that.

And at http://gder.phpnet.org/The_worldwide_co ... tents.html you can see some code to find an inventor's country if it's missing. Having more information is always helpful to distinguish between inventors with the same name.

I would link inventors with applicants, look at co-inventorships, time periods and technological fields.
Also it's best to start cleaning those names that have the highest number of patents assigned to them. No sense spending a lot of time on a "John Smith" if John only invented two patents.

I'm rather pressed for time these days but I wouldn't mind brainstorming about this with you.