What applications are in PATSTAT?

[knikonor]

Hello to all!

Maybe a dumb question but help me please to find out if PATSTAT holds all
applications inside, I mean:

- registered and published
- registered and granted a patent
- declined or rejected for grant by any reason but still published etc.

May I say that I can find ALL applications regardless ot their status - published,
granted, declined etc.? And how to sort applications by their status? A1,A2 B1,B2 etc.?

[knikonor]

Dear colleagues!

Maybe this is not trivial question? All I'd like to find out is what kind of applications
are present in PATSTAT. Can I find e.g. rejected applications?

Many thanks for your help!
Kirill.

[nico.rasters]

Good question. Maybe someone with access to TLS221_INPADOC_PRS can answer this?
http://www.epo.org/searching/subscripti ... -24-1.html

Theoretically I would say that all kind of applications can be present in PATSTAT. It is snapshot data after all.
There are around 50.000 patents in the April edition that are missing in October. Percentage wise that's almost nothing. So my assumption is that applications are not removed, and therefore you should find rejected patents as well.

But... it's an assumption. So best to wait for an official reply from the EPO or from someone who can check TLS221.

[Geert Boedt]

The question is not that easy to answer - or just very easy, depending how you look at it. Here are a couple of correct answers:
PATSTAT contains ONLY data on applications that have been published (with a small exception of references to cited applications, for which dummy applications and publications have been added to maintain data base integrity.)

PATSTAT contains data on publications for which national patent offices have provided the EPO with data. Some offices provide irregular (or no) data.

PATSTAT is a snapshot of the DocDB database, and has therefore the same coverage as DocDB or any derived patent information products such as ESPACENET or Global Patent Index. The coverage of the DocDB database is described in the document “Contents and coverage of the DOCDB bibliographic file” at this link: http://www.epo.org/searching/data/data/ ... eekly.html
PATSTAT contains a “flag” called publn_first_grant, which allows users to retrieve the respective publication linked to the granted patent. Some countries do not provide us with the publications of the “granted patent”, so this can be a pitfall when doing data aggregation (there are no patents granted for country xyz... ? ).

PATSTAT contains data on “declined or rejected for grant by any reason but still published etc.” Correct; and PATSTAT does NOT contain data on NOT published applications, with other words: applications withdrawn before publication. The “reasons” for the not grant can be analysed in the add-on data base “EPO register for PATSTAT”. There is no (public) information on applications that have not been published, because.... they are not published.

The status of a patent application can be (partly) deduced from the publication kind codes. Example : an EP- B1 publication indicates the EP patent was granted, but not if it is still valid. It does not tell you neither in which EPO member state it has been registered after the grant. To know this, one should have to analyse the legal status of that application via the tls221_inpadoc_prs table. But at the same time, some national patent offices will re-publish the granted EP applications, so that could also be a sign that the patent “entered national phase”. (most researchers look for the legal status codes PGFP which is a clear sign that the renewal fee was paid for a granted and registered patent in a certain country.)

And finally: patent applications that have been published never become “un-published”. Each PATSTAT release will contain the old and the new applications & publications provided to, or published by the EPO. These can also be backlogs of old publications.

Geert Boedt
PATSTAT customer support