Patent analysis method ｜ patent citation analysis
Original Ugliness & Visualization of Teacher Cat’s Patent Analysis
Citation between patent documents is the information that reflects their technical relevance, including the documents cited by the applicant in the background technology of his patent application, the comparison documents used by the examiner in the examination process, and the evidence documents submitted by the third party when requesting patent invalidation.
Patent citation can be divided into Cited and quoting, also known as Backward citation and Forward citation. The corresponding patent citations are called cited documents and cited documents. Among them, the cited document refers to the reference document cited by the target patent/family, and the cited document refers to the later document cited by the target patent/family. The relationship among the target patent/family, cited documents and cited documents is shown in the table below.
By combing the citation relationship, the undertaking order of technological innovation research and development among patent documents can be established, which can help analysts reproduce the development process of patent technology. It can also be used as auxiliary information to judge the importance of a patent document by counting the cited situation of a patent document, such as the number of cited documents, the technical field of cited documents, the applicant of cited documents, etc. On this basis, we can also combine the information related to patent literature sources such as country, applicant or inventor, so as to judge the historical contribution, technical strength and competitive position of the technology source.
Case 1: the applicant who cited the most important patent US6191007 in the field of 1：FDSOI technology.
The applicant who cited the patent US6191007 the most times.
Chart Source: Zhang Maoyu. Industrial Patent Analysis Report (Volume 50) Advanced Chip Manufacturing Technology [M]. Beijing: Intellectual Property Press, 2017.
The most frequently cited patent application in the field of FDSOI technology is the patent application with publication number of US6191007 filed by Denso in 1998, which was cited 316 times, and all of them were not self-cited. The main technical direction of this patent application is technology, which is to fabricate SOI or super-wave SOI substrates by ion implantation.
The applicant who cited the patent US6191007 the most was Monolithic 3D Inc, and it can be known that the company may have made key research and development in the field of substrate technology of FDSOI following Denso’s technology. At the same time, other applicants who cited this important patent are Micron, Innovative Silicon and IBM, and these applicants are also key applicants or potentially important applicants in the field of FDSOI.
Case 2: The most influential patent applicant of microalgae related technology
The most influential patent applicant for microalgae-related technology
Chart source: WIPO patent landscape report: micro alga-related technologies
The above figure lists the most influential patent applicants for microalgae-related technologies, and provides two indicators to measure the applicant’s influence, one is the number of patent families owned by the applicant, and the other is the Citation Velocity of the applicant’s patents. The patent citation rate in this report refers to the average number of times each patent is cited by other people’s later applications every year, which excludes the applicant’s self-citation. This citation includes Patent examiners’s citation in the review process as a comparison document, and also includes other patent applicants’ use as prior art documents in the background technology of their patent application documents. The higher the number of citations, the greater the influence of the applicant in this field.
Case 3: Patent citation network of patent applicants in the field of quantum metrology and sensing
Patent citation network of patent applicants in the field of quantum metrology and sensing
Chart source: EPO landscape study on patent filing: quantum metrology and sensing
Through citation analysis, we can also see that there is a very close relationship between enterprise applicants and research institution applicants in the field of quantum metrology and sensing in technology research and development. For example, most of Lockheed Martin’s 55 patents cite the patent documents of university applicants, and 17 of them cite the patents of Melbourne University.
Original title: Patent Analysis Method | Patent Citation Analysis
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