Refilling patent inventors country in patstat

When trying to make statistics by country of inventor, using Patstat, we always have to face the issue of missing data I already highlighted in some previous posts (for example here http://rawpatentdata.blogspot.it/2013/05/about-persons-country-code-in-patstat.html)


de Rassenfosse, G., Dernis, H., Guellec, D., Picci, L. & van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, B., 2013. "The worldwide count of priority patents: A new indicator of inventive activity". Research Policy 42(3), 720-737.

The indicator proposed in this paper  counts priority patent applications filed by inventors from

a given country regardless of the patent office of application eliminating the geographic bias (but at the

introducing an institutional bias)

This methodology thus needs to get rid of the wide gaps in Patstat country assignation in table TLS206.

 

REFILLING of ctry codes:

The algorithm first selects all the priority filings of a given patent office in a given year. Then, for each filing that has missing information on the inventor’s country of residence, the algorithm looks into

six potential sources of information

• Source 1:  the priority document itself, when the information is available.

• Source 2: Retrieves information on inventors from the earliest direct equivalent in which the information is available.

• Source 3: If no information is available in the direct equivalents, the other second filings of the same family are browsed.

• Source 4: the country of residence of the applicant, as indicated in the priority document,

is used to proxy the country of the inventor.

• Source 5: If the country of the applicant is missing, it is searched for in the direct equivalents.

• Source 6: If no information on the applicant’s country was found, it is tracked in all the other second filings of the same family.

• Source 7: Finally, if the information is still missing, the country of the priority office is used for the country of residence of the inventor.

Mysql code and explanation can be downloaded from:

http://gder.phpnet.org/rassenfosse/paper_The_worldwide_count_of_priority_patents.html