Have a look at the cover sheet of this United States patent. Everything that you see here—plus more information that you do not see here—constitutes this patent’s bibliographic data.The visualizations presented via this blog make only limited use of the full range of available patent bibliographic data. In general, text and image information (e.g. abstract, description, claims, drawings) is not used. For the most part, information that can be counted is used.
For example, the question “how many patents did firm X prosecute on behalf of assignee Y for inventions handled by USPTO art unit Z ?” is answered by counting the number of patents which satisfy all three of those criteria. Accordingly, patent bibliographic details such as firm names, assignee names and art unit numbers are utilized. But, apart from counting the total number of claims in a patent, neither the text comprising a patent’s abstract, description and claims nor the drawing images are useful for the purposes of the visualizations presented via this blog.
Some dates can be useful, especially if they facilitate calculation of meaningful statistics for a large group of documents. For example, the time span between an application’s filing date and the corresponding patent’s issue date provides a useful measure that can be used to address questions such as “What is the average filing-to-issue time in years for US patents which issued in 2012 to assignee X for inventions in IPC subclass G06Q ?”
In future posts I’ll delve more deeply into other aspects of patent bibliographic data.
