Any patent experts in the house?

[Rallispec]

I'm trying to do a background patent search on a general technology area, I've already done some legwork searching on google patents looking at the prior art, etc... Now I've got a list of patents in the same general area as the technology field i'm researching.

What I'm looking for now is a good way to visualize or organize the patents. IE - which patents reference other patents, how many are in specific areas of the general technology, etc...

I also really want rank them - It'd be nice to see how many times each patent is referenced by other patents out there.


ANyhow done anything like this before and know of any tools or software that might help?

 

[iRONic]

Yep. PM the man who started this thread;

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2307498

 

[Sho'Nuff]

Yep. PM the man who started this thread;

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2307498

Someone called me?

OP - there are a lot of ways to do what you are thinking about. What the best approach is depends on the situation. For a typical patent search, I might do the following:

1. Set up an excel spreadsheet including fields for Patent Number, Filing Date, Assignee, representative claims, and related applications, comments, and rank (A, B, C, with A being most relevant, B being somewhat relevant, etc.)

2. Fill out the spreadsheet for each patent/application identified.

3. If a family of patents has been identified, I'll might illustrate the relationships with a web diagram (Google that if you don;t know what it is), based on priority claims for each application. This can get complicated, as you are probably aware.

Some useful websites you might want to consider -

1. http://worldwide.espacenet.com/advancedSearch?locale=en_EP - European patent office website - if you type in the patent/application number, you will be brought to a page with links to applications corresponding to the inputted number. If you click on one of the links, in most cases you will be brought to a page with a link on the left hand side titled "inpadoc patent family." Click on that, and it will identify family related applications/patents to the application/patent you entered.

2. Google patents (you seem to have discovered this already)

3. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/ - another good online patent search site.

4. http://www.pat2pdf.org/ (obtain free pdf copies of U.S. patents/pre-grant pubs. Useful in some circumstances.


You can discover how many US applicaitons/patents reference another U.S. applicaition/patent by using the USPTO web based search tool and the "REF" field modifier. See http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm

Note that the USPTO website has a separate search tool for US patents vs. pre-grant publications.