Non-member submission from ["Roger S Sherman" <roger.sherman@sri.com>]
One of our researchers would like to know if it would be possible to
obtain a figure for the number of international patents published in the
field of chemistry in 1998 for Canada. That is, "any patent from any
Canadian research institute or company issued or published in 1998
either by the Canadian or other patent offices."
I'm finding 2 aspects of the question troubling. I believe (1) it would
be more statistically valid to take either applications made OR patents
granted and (2) to count patent families rather than individual
equivalents!
Is there any way to obtain this information? I don't recall any
nationality/residence field in patent records on the Derwent World
Patents Index.
I noticed the CIPO website (http://patents1.ic.gc.ca/intro-e.html)
includes a field "inventor country," but the "chemistry" criterion
(roughly IPC=C*) causes the system to overload, even with the 1998
restriction. I could do parts of the classification at a time then add
the results, but, since patents are assigned more than one code, I would
get duplication.
Then I tried to get a rough estimate by doing a World Patents Index
search on STN, combining Canadian priority with publication in Canada in
1998, making the wild assumption that for most patents their priority is
the country of residence (of at least one of) its inventor(s).
"CA/PC(P)1998/PY and CA/PYC" gave me 3,514. This in combination with
IPC=C* yielded 422.
It seems to me it will not be possible to get accurate figures for 1998
applications until 18 months after December 1998 (June 2000+). And, of
course, not all applications eventually get published. And since it
sometimes takes a long time for applications to be granted, it wouldn't
really reflect 1998 productivity/inventiveness anyway...
Does any of this make sense?
Any suggestions / ideas?
Roger Sherman roger.sherman@sri.com
Research Information Services 650-859-5981 v
SRI International 650-859-2757 f
Menlo Park, California
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