Report:MicroPatent PatentWeb/Viewing Results/Analyzing Results
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Analyzing Results
WorkSheets allow the user to view, delete and sort up to 20,000 patent references by family before exporting data from the results set. However, in most users’ experience, it is not worthwhile to create a worksheet for the purpose of reviewing or manipulating the results set before export. As described in the Saving Results section above, the review of text in documents from worksheets can become tedious. It requires the user to click through multiple screens before viewing the full text or citations.
Editor's Note:Because of these limitations, many users only use WorkSheets as a tool to export necessary data fields directly into .CSV Excel spreadsheets. Some searchers use this spreadsheet in conjunction with an active PatSearch hitlist, viewing the full text results there and switching to the Excel sheet to take notes.
There are some additional functions that may be performed in a WorkSheet before export: sort by family, reduce to 1 member per family, order or download patent documents, remove duplicates, create report (the same type of HTML or PDF hitlist reports which can be generated from the initial hitlist page can also be generated from the WorkSheet screen – see The Hit List for more information) and graph results. Most of these options are straightforward or discussed in other sections of this article; here we will focus on PatentWeb’s graphing feature, also called PatGraph.
Any power to perform statistical analysis from within MicroPatent lies in the PatGraph feature of the WorkSheet. This option, accessed via the “graph results” hyperlink, allows users to generate a number of simple graphs from the data. Because this feature is somewhat limited, users wishing to create sophisticated, customizable graphs would need to export the fields of interest to .CSV process and use a more powerful visualization program. However, those who wish to quickly view a simple graph of the data without having to go through the export process have the following options through a MicroPatent worksheet:
- 2D Graph (Patent count vs. Assignee for Top 10 assignees)
- 2D Graph (Patent count vs. Main IPC for Top 10 IPC class - i.e. A61K)*
- Pie Chart (Patent count vs. Assignee for Top 10 assignees)
- Pie Chart (Patent count vs. Main IPC for Top 10 IPC class – i.e. A61K)*
- 3D Graph (Patent count vs. Assignee and Issue Date for Top 10 assignees)
- 2D Graph (Patent count vs. Year for all data)
*MicroPatent favors IPC-R over IPC-7 data wherever possible; however when IPC-R data is not present, IPC-7 data is used in that data field.
Once the graph is generated a few more commands are possible: left-clicking on a bar or pie slice shows the number of documents represented by that portion of the graph, and right clicking generates a list of all documents associated with that portion.
PatGraph requires a Java-enabled web browser, and MicroPatent recommends Internet Explorer over Netscape for printing the graphs.
Editor's Note:MicroPatent’s PatSearch in-system analysis tools were launched in 2001, and by today’s standards they are not particularly impressive. This is probably intentional, as the company probably wants to direct users toward Aureka, its data analysis software. The bottom line for PatSearch users is that the system offers a weak, limited statistical analysis tool.
Even within its graphing capabilities, PatGraph’s primary disadvantage is the lack of basic flexibility: it does not allow users to alter the graph parameters in any way (e.g. there is no way to eliminate huge or tiny data points that are skewing the data), and there is no way to rotate the 3D graphs to gain different perspectives. The system is so limited that for any serious analysis or graphing endeavor, users are likely to export the patent data and use more advanced programs.
The software that would allow MicroPatent to create a more versatile statistical analysis tool surely exists, but MicroPatent chooses to limit their functionality in this regard.
