in the past and before granting the inventors and owners of intellectual property rights special exclusive rights and privileges under the patent laws, the protection of intellectual property rights was possible only through a legal regime which could help to keep the know how and innovation secret. this regime, in which contractual terms are often used to keep the innovation secret, is called ...

Current patent systems face a serious problem of declining quality of patents as the larger number of applications make it difficult for patent officers to spend enough time for evaluating each application. For building a better patent system, it is necessary to define a public consensus on the quality of patent applications in a quantitative way. In this article, we tackle the problem of asses...

This study uses bibliographic coupling to identify missing relevant patent links, in order to construct a comprehensive citation network. Missing citation links can be added by taking the missing relevant patent links into account. The Pareto principle is used to determine the threshold of bibliographic coupling strength, in order to identify the missing relevant patent links. Comparisons betwe...

Prior art retrieval plays an important role in patent examination. If a patent examiner can quickly and accurately retrieve prior art for an application patent, s/he will be able to efficiently and effectively judge the novelty of an application patent, and in turn, avoid hampering the technology development of the application domain. Moreover, in order to avoid losing tangible and intangible a...