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Validating the usefulness of examiners’ forward citations from the viewpoint of applicants’ self-selection during the patent application procedure

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Abstract

In this study, we validated the usefulness of examiners’ forward citations, especially from the viewpoint of the applicants’ self-selection (ASS) decisions during the patent application procedure. We believe that the ASS in an early stage would be decided by a potential-value comparison among patent applications. We focused on six self-selection decision points of the applicants: whether to file patent applications in foreign countries, request for examination, request for accelerated examination, reply to a notification of reasons for refusal, appeal after receiving a decision of refusal, and register after receiving a decision to grant a patent as patent value parameters. We found that application groups that selected “Yes” have a significantly larger number of examiners’ forward citations than groups that selected “No” at all decision points. In addition, we confirmed that applications that were finally granted and those that were renewed for a full term after grant have a significantly large number of examiners’ forward citations. We concluded that the number of examiners’ forward citations would be a useful indicator of the potential value of patent applications in macroscopic analysis.

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Notes

  1. IIP stands for the Institute of Intellectual Property, a research institute based in Tokyo that works closely with the JPO. We accessed the IIP patent database last updated on March 2011.

  2. We grouped all patent applications into 35 technical fields according to the principal IPC based on “IPC–Technology Concordance Table” (WIPO 2013).

  3. “The number of countries in the patent family” was extracted by counting the countries where the patent document was published. Here, we did not recognize international publication (WO publication) as a country.

  4. During the fiscal years 1991–2000, the period of request for examination was 7 years, but it was reduced to 3 years in October 2001.

  5. In 2010, the mean waiting period was 28.7 months for ordinary examinations and 1.7 months for accelerated examinations (JPO 2011).

  6. This period is 60 days for Japanese applicants and 3 months for foreign applicants.

  7. This period was 30 days during the fiscal years 1991–2000, while it is 3 months now.

  8. This procedure is based on the Patent Act of Japan, Articles 108(1) and 18(1).

  9. We grouped patent applications into five technical sectors (Chemistry, Electrical engineering, Instruments, Mechanical engineering, and Others) according to the principal IPC based on “IPC–Technology Concordance Table” (WIPO 2013). (The data of “Others” are not shown in Table 2.).

  10. We analyzed 34,370 applications, for which we could know the number of claims from our database, selected from 36,776 applications in Table 1.

  11. In the latter group, the proportion of “No” for point A in Table 1 is only 4.1 % compared to 88.1 % in the former group.

  12. We determined whether the applicants were Japanese by their mailing address. If any applicant’s address was not in Japan, we excluded it even if all other applicants’ addresses were in Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Course of Intellectual Property in Biosciences, Department of Medical Genome Sciences, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Satoshi Yasukawa & Shingo Kano

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  1. Satoshi Yasukawa
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  2. Shingo Kano
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Correspondence to Satoshi Yasukawa.

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Yasukawa, S., Kano, S. Validating the usefulness of examiners’ forward citations from the viewpoint of applicants’ self-selection during the patent application procedure. Scientometrics 99, 895–909 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1195-1

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