Singling Out Individual Inventors from Patent Data

An increasing number of studies in recent years have sought to identify individual inventors from patent data. A variety of heuristics have been proposed for using the names and other information disclosed in patent documents to establish “who is who” in patents. This paper contributes to this literature by describing a methodology for identifying inventors using patents applied to the European Patent Office (EPO hereafter). As in much of this literature, we basically follow a three-step 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 similar names; and (3) the filtering stage, where additional information and various scoring schemes are used to filter out these similarly-named inventors. The paper presents the results obtained by using the algorithms with the set of European inventors applying to the EPO over a long period of time.