About citation origins in Patstat

When examinating citations, it may be important to classify them using the moment of examination process where they have been introduced.

TLS212 in patstat has a field allowing to classify the origin of citations, under these cathegories:

0 - SEA- citations introduced during search

1 - APP- citations introduced by the applicant

2 - EXA- citations introduced during examination

3 - OPP - citations introduced during opposition

4 - 115- citations introduced according to Art 115 EPC

5 - ISR  -citations from the International Search Report

6 - SUP - citations from the Supplementary Search Report

7  - CH2 - citations introduced during the Chapter 2 phase of the PCT

More info in this document.

Obviusly all these origins are available only for EPO, we may make some counts by citing application authority
 

auth	origin	#citations received
'BE'	'0    '	66913
'BE'	'1    '	1963
'BE'	'7    '	1
'CA'	'0    '	134061
'CA'	'1    '	8491
'CA'	'5    '	9004
'DE'	'0    '	5008515
'DE'	'1    '	267515
'DE'	'7    '	5
'EP'	'0    '	8636742
'EP'	'1    '	908599
'EP'	'2    '	342826
'EP'	'3    '	31157
'EP'	'4    '	27313
'EP'	'6    '	6
'EP'	'7    '	104
'FR'	'0    '	2627633
'FR'	'1    '	55917
'FR'	'5    '	4
'FR'	'7    '	9
'GB'	'0    '	1724570
'GB'	'1    '	15577
'GB'	'6    '	12
'GB'	'7    '	12
'IT'	'0    '	49268
'IT'	'1    '	1610
'IT'	'7    '	2
'US'	'0    '	45542915
'US'	'1    '	24998499
'US'	'5    '	106340
'US'	'6    '	35
'US'	'7    '	4622
WO	'0    '	8286173
WO	'1    '	455017
WO	'5    '	316806
WO	'6    '	63
WO	'7    '	4923

 

NOTE:

different origins (mostly 0 and 1) may coexist inside the same patent citation

These are the number of multipleorigins by citing publication authority:

'BE'	210
'CH'	55
'DE'	30031
'DK'	14
'EP'	177345
'FR'	8793
'GR'	18
'LU'	31
'NL'	1161
'US'	146684
'WO'	70372

Take for instance this case:  EP 1039145

 

PAT_PUBLN_ID	CITN_ID	CITED_PAT PUBLN_ID	PAT_CITN SEQ_NR	CITN_ORIGIN
18543416	1	13060594	1	'0    '
18543416	2	13555391	2	'0    '
18543416	3	22057918	3	'0    '
18543416	4	12483574	4	'0    '
18543416	5	49192181	0	'0    '
18543416	6	45186010	0	'0    '
18543416	7	13060594	7	'1    '
18543416	8	13555391	8	'1    '
18543416	9	22057918	9	'1    '

3 citations exist both as given from examiner and given from applicant (the yellow lines)

If you like you can crosscheck @ espacenet or @ epo register...

About chained patent priorities (part II)

As stated in previous post on chained priorities, since application A may have among it's priorities an application B that has a priority C and so on,

Since most probably origin of such chains are divisional applications. we may think about the need of recursively calculate as well priority date of applications.

In reality looking deeper into data and trying to understand of how many years would change the priority date by applying such calculations, we see improvement is very poor:

years	# apps	%
-6	4.491	0,02%
-5	4.529	0,02%
-4	9.346	0,04%
-3	21.070	0,09%
-2	47.337	0,20%
-1	147.432	0,63%
0	23.326.843	99,01%

Less than 1% applications would change it's priority year.

On the other hand we may try to see some time series to understand if the lenght of chains is someway biased by year of application.

We notice from below graph, showing % of applications with 1 chained priority in last 20 years, that 1987 and 1988 had a peak, as well as 1994 1995 had a decrease, but overall we have a base line of about 6%.



















Here below also detailed data by 5 yrs periods.

degree	1980-1984		1985-1989		1990-1994		1995-1999		2000-2004		2005-2009
0	1.362.490	92,94%	1.622.698	90,62%	2.116.052	93,59%	2.959.115	94,80%	4.018.002	93,32%	3.570.167	93,65%
1	99.539	6,79%	162.194	9,06%	139.624	6,18%	160.627	5,15%	284.970	6,62%	240.174	6,30%
2	3.348	0,23%	5.136	0,29%	4.914	0,22%	1.642	0,05%	2.237	0,05%	1.720	0,05%
3	444	0,03%	528	0,03%	428	0,02%	121	0,00%	177	0,00%	74	0,00%
>4	89	0,01%	124	0,01%	82	0,00%	10	0,00%	30	0,00%	32	0,00%
Total	1.465.910		1.790.680		2.261.100		3.121.515		4.305.416		3.812.167

Thanks to Alfonso Gambardella and Myriam Mariani for suggestions.