Patents are a very useful source of technical information. The public availability of patents over the Internet, with for some databases (eg. Espacenet) the assurance of a constant format, allows the development of high value added products using this information source and provides an easy way to analyze patent information. This simple and powerful tool facilitates the use of patents in academ...

Given the growing number of patents led in multiple countries, users are interested in retrieving patents across languages. We propose a multi-lingual patent retrieval system, which translates a user query into the target language, searches a multilingual database for patents relevant to the query, and improves the browsing e ciency by way of machine translation and clustering. Our system also ...

Article history: Received 11 October 2007 Received in revised form 10 February 2008 Accepted 17 March 2008 Among the many technology forecasting indicators, patents and patent citations are useful and important indicators. The more frequently a certain patent is cited by subsequent patents, the more the related technology can be said to be diffused, implying that the technology is more widely a...

U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequate...

Based on the critical case of ABB, this paper questions the relevance of using patents with multiple inventors from different countries (“cross-country patents”) as an indicator of international R&D collaboration. The study shows that less than half of ABB’s cross-country patents are the result of international R&D collaboration as described by one of the more inclusive definitions found in pre...

To what extent are firms kept out of a market by patents covering related technologies? Do patents held by potential entrants make it easier to enter markets? We estimate the empirical relationship between market entry and patents for 27 narrowly defined categories of software products during the period 1990-2004. Controlling for demand, market structure, patent quality, and other factors, we f...

We argue that culture undergoes an evolutionary process, analogous to biological evolution. As evidence, we analyze the bibliographic information of all utility patents issued in the United States from 1976 through 2007, which comprise over three million patents. The set of issued patents is regarded as an evolving population. A patent is considered to “reproduce” when it is cited by a new pate...

We examine the extent to which U.S. patent applications and patents granted respond to the cyclical variation of the U.S. economy as reflected by major macroeconomic aggregates such as real GDP and others. We find that patents granted are cointegrated with GDP and research and development indicating a long run stochastic relationship among these variables. We also find Granger Causality going f...

The U.S. patents network is a network of almost 3.8 millions patents (network vertices) from the year 1963 to 1999 (Hall et al. (2001)) and more than 16.5 millions citations (network arcs). It is an example of a very large citation network. We analyzed the U.S. patents network with the tools of network analysis in order to get insight into the structure of the network as an initial step to the ...

Given the growing number of patents filed in multiple countries, users are interested in retrieving patents across languages. We propose a multi-lingual patent retrieval system, which translates a user query into the target language, searches a multilingual database for patents relevant to the query, and improves the browsing efficiency by way of machine translation and clustering. Our system a...