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Interactive overlay maps for US patent (USPTO) data based on International Patent Classification (IPC)

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Abstract

We report on the development of an interface to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that allows for the mapping of patent portfolios as overlays to basemaps constructed from citation relations among all patents contained in this database during the period 1976–2011. Both the interface and the data are in the public domain; the freeware programs VOSViewer and/or Pajek can be used for the visualization. These basemaps and overlays can be generated at both the 3-digit and 4-digit levels of the International Patent Classification (IPC) of the world intellectual property organization (WIPO). The basemaps can provide a stable mental framework for analysts to follow developments over searches for different years, which can be animated. The full flexibility of the advanced search engines of USPTO are available for generating sets of patents and/or patent applications which can thus be visualized and compared. This instrument allows for addressing questions about technological distance, diversity in portfolios, and animating the developments of both technologies and technological capacities of organizations over time.

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Notes

  1. Schmoch et al. (2003) provided a concordance table between International Patent Classification (IPC) and industrial classifications with the NACE codes (“Nomenclature statistique des activités économiques dans la Communauté européenne”) used by the OECD.

  2. “A patent family is a set of patents taken at various offices to protect a given invention. It is triadic when the invention to which it refers has been the subject of a patent application at the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japan Patent Office (JPO), and the subject of the issue of a title of ownership at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In other words, a triadic patent protects an invention on the U.S., European and Japanese markets simultaneously.” Source: http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/savoir/indicateurs/triadiques/index_an.htm.

  3. The program uspto1.exe can be used for downloading the citing patents using the routines available at http://www.leydesdorff.net/indicators/lesson5.htm (Leydesdorff, 2004).

  4. EPO data are available online, but there are limitations to the searches (above 500 documents) and some of this data is in the pdf format. PCT patents of WIPO are available online (Leydesdorff 2008), but as noted of lower technological and market quality than USPTO patents (Shelton & Leydesdorff, 2012).

  5. The two databases can be found at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm for granted patents, and http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html for patent applications, respectively.

  6. Kruskall’s formula (1964) is expressed as follows:

    \( S = \sqrt {\frac{{\sum\nolimits_{i \ne j} {} (\left\| {x_{i} - x_{j} } \right\| - d_{ij} )^{2} }}{{\sum\nolimits_{i \ne j} {d_{ij}^{2} } }}} \)

    In addition to summing the differences between the visually available distances and the algorithmic distances, this stress value is normalized at the level of the system of distances (in the denominator). Regrettably, VOSViewer does hitherto not provide a stress value for the (deterministic) visualization.

  7. This addition of unity is needed because log(1) is zero. Fractional counts may be smaller than unity.

  8. The corresponding value at the 4-digit level is: r = 0.648 (p < 0.01).

  9. The full cosine matrices are available at http://www.leydesdorff.net/ipcmaps/cos_ipc3.dbf and http://www.leydesdorff.net/ipcmaps/cos_ipc4.dbf for those users who wish to be able to work with cosine values lower than the current threshold of 0.2.

  10. Since April 2009, class B82 in IPC replaces the previous class Y01 in ECLA.

  11. A search with “icl/B82$” provided a recall of 344 patents on September 25, 2012, whereas a search with “ccl/977$)” provided a recall of 8,134 patents. Of these two sets 249 overlap (using an AND statement).

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge support by the ESRC project ‘Mapping the Dynamics of Emergent Technologies’ (RES-360-25-0076). We are grateful to Nils Newman and Antoine Schoen for previous comments and communications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Loet Leydesdorff

  2. Environmental Systems Analysis, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden

    Duncan Kushnir

  3. SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex, Freeman Centre, Falmer Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 9QE, UK

    Ismael Rafols

  4. Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain

    Ismael Rafols

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  1. Loet Leydesdorff
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Correspondence to Loet Leydesdorff.

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Leydesdorff, L., Kushnir, D. & Rafols, I. Interactive overlay maps for US patent (USPTO) data based on International Patent Classification (IPC). Scientometrics 98, 1583–1599 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0923-2

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