Name disambiguation and the subsequent name conflation are essential for the correct processing of person name queries in a digital library or other database. It distinguishes each unique person from all other records in the database. We study inventor name disambiguation for a patent database using methods and features from earlier work on author name disambiguation and propose a feature set a...

The inventive step is nowadays generally regarded as the key threshold variable ensuring balance in patent systems, effectively operating as a proxy to ensure benefits exceeding costs. Despite the active debate about the current inventiveness standard, there has been little attempt to measure it. The study reported here uses data from recently granted Australian business method patents, and tes...

Nanotechnology holds the promise to revolutionize a wide range of products, processes and applications. It is recognized by over sixty countries as critical for their development at the beginning of the 21st century. A significant public investment of over $1 billion annually is devoted to nanotechnology research in the United States. This paper provides an analysis of the National Science Foun...

Nanotechnology research has experienced rapid growth in recent years. Advances in information technology enable efficient investigation of publications, their contents, and relationships for large sets of nanotechnology-related documents in order to assess the status of the field. This paper presents the development of a new knowledge mapping system, called Nano Mapper (http://nanomapper.eller....

Researchers studying innovation increasingly use indicators based on patent citations. However, it is well known that not all citations originate from applicants— patent examiners contribute to citations listed in issued patents—and that this could complicate interpretation of findings in this literature. In 2001 the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) began reporting examiner and applicant ...

Economic globalization implies a growing interdependence of resources across countries. Technological R&D and cross-border collaboration are often identified as the primary driving forces in the process. This study aims to holistically analyze global landscape of international collaboration and identify influential countries and the interdependencies among countries. A total of 458,381 internat...

Scholars have spilled much ink questioning patent quality. Complaints encompass concern about incoming applications, examination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”), and the USPTO’s ultimate output. The literature and some empirical data also suggest, however, that applications, examination, and output may differ considerably based on technology. Most notably, although definitions...

We report the results of the first comparative study of the determinants and effects of patent oppositions in Europe and of reexaminations on corresponding patents issued in the United States. The analysis is based on a data set consisting of matched European Patent Office (EPO) and U.S. patents. Our analysis focuses on two broad technology categories—biotechnology and pharmaceuticals and compu...

This paper describes our work at the sixth NTCIR workshop on the subtask of invalidity search for patent retrieval. We compared different patent surrogates for their effectiveness on invalidity search. Our preliminary results show that the query by the Claims field plus PRF (pseudo relevance feedback) leads to the best results in terms of relevance degree A while the query by all free-text fiel...