Singling out individual inventors from patent data

Ernest Miguelez and Ismael Gómez-Miguélez ()
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Ismael Gómez-Miguélez: Signal Theory and Communications Department. Technical University of Catalonia, c/ Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain.

No XREAP2011-03, Working Papers from Xarxa de Referència en Economia Aplicada (XREAP)

Abstract: An increasing number of studies have sprung up in recent years seeking to identify individual inventors from patent data. Different heuristics have been suggested to use their names and other information disclosed in patent documents in order to find out “who is who” in patents. This paper contributes to this literature by setting forth a methodology to identify them using patents applied to the European Patent Office (EPO hereafter). As in the large part of this literature, we basically follow a three-steps procedure: (1) the parsing stage, aimed at reducing the noise in the inventor’s name and other fields of the patent; (2) the matching stage, where name matching algorithms are used to group possible similar names; (3) the filtering stage, where additional information and different scoring schemes are used to filter out these potential same inventors. The paper includes some figures resulting of applying the algorithms to the set of European inventors applying to the EPO for a large period of time.

Keywords: “Names game”; patent data; unique inventors; name matching algorithms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 J61 O31 O33 R0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2011-05, Revised 2011-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://www.xreap.cat/RePEc/xrp/pdf/XREAP2011-03.pdf First version, 2011 (application/pdf)
http://www.xreap.cat/RePEc/xrp/pdf/XREAP2011-03.pdf Revised version, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Singling out individual inventors from patent data (2011)
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