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...

While records of the assignments (transactions) affecting US patents and patent applications have been maintained by the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) for over 40 years, few researchers have used them. To help remedy this deficiency, the USPTO Office of Chief Economist is releasing...

The recent surge in U.S. patenting and expansion of patentable subject matter has increased patent office backlogs and raised concerns that in some cases patents of insufficient quality or with inadequate search of prior art are being issued. At the same time patent litigation and its costs are...

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). One major reason for this lack of research has been the paucity of readily-available data on the examination of applications....