A surprisingly small amount of empirical research has been focused on the process of obtaining a patent grant from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The purpose of this document is to describe the Patent Examination Dataset (PatEX), make a large amount of information from the...

This article describes the “USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset” (PatEx), and explores possible selection issues and the representativeness of the 9.1 million US patent application records it contains. We find that data are sparse for years before 1981, and that serious selection...