Introduction
Important
Using the Reporting Date
Charts and Tables
Reproducibility of Past Analyses at Later Dates
Introduction
This article explains the Reporting Date concept and how it is applied in PatentSight®.
The Reporting Date concept allows us to "travel back in time" and to analyze the patent landscape as it was in the past. Each Reporting Date is a moment in time for which the evaluation of a patent portfolio or a patent family is done.
The current Reporting Date shows the state of the world as it is now. This date changes weekly with every update of the PatentSight database. The older Reporting Dates are each set at the end of every preceding year (December 31). Currently, 22 past Reporting Dates are available, reaching back to the year 2000.
Important:
It is not possible to select a Reporting Date other than the ones that are available by default. You can only select between the current Reporting Date and December 31 of each of the past years available reaching back to 2000.
For any selected Reporting Date, only patent families that were active at that date are taken into consideration for the analysis. Active patent families are defined as all patent families with at least one active member—this can either be a pending patent application or an in force patent.
Moreover, for any Reporting Date selected, only the information that was already available at that point in time is considered for calculating the PatentSight metrics. This includes citation data and any additional information used to calculate our indicators. The only exception is patent ownership information: For any given Reporting Date, the owner of a patent family is always the current Ultimate Owner, even if the patent family had belonged to a different entity in the past. Moreover, in cases where we receive data that should have been available at a past date or where data has been corrected, information may change retrospectively.
For example, selecting the Reporting Date "31/12/2013" means that no patent families published in 2014 or later are taken into consideration. It also means that the Market Coverage for the patent families that were active on "31/12/2013" is calculated using the GNI values corresponding to that particular year—and not the current values.
Using the Reporting Date
Search Panel:
To apply a past Reporting Date to your search results to "travel back in time," click on the Reporting Date displayed at the bottom of the search panel and select a Reporting Date of interest.
Note:
Since the past Reporting Dates only take into consideration patent families that were active at that point in time, it is not possible to select a past Reporting Date and, at the same time, include inactive patent families.
Tip:
To apply the Reporting Date selected to all sheets in your workbook, open the section "Options" in the main toolbar and click on "Apply Reporting Date to Entire Workbook".
Charts and Tables
Past Reporting Dates can also be displayed in charts and tables by applying one of the attributes "Reporting Date" or "Reporting Date (Year)". For example, the analysis template "Patent Asset Index Trend" shows how the Patent Asset Index of a given portfolio has developed over time. I.e., it shows the Patent Asset Index of all patent families that were active at each point in time. It is calculated as the sum of the Competitive Impact (Market Coverage x Technology Relevance) of all these patent families at the respective point in time.
Another example for the use of the Reporting Date in a chart are the bubble trails that can be displayed in bubble charts. Each bubble in the trail represents one Reporting Date, with the decreasing transparency signifying how the data has developed over time.
You can also add the attribute "Reporting Date" to a table to obtain an overview of the exact values per each date.
Reproducibility of Past Analyses at Later Dates
Since patent data is "alive" and the PatentSight database is constantly being updated and improved, the exact reproduction of analysis results from the past may not be possible at a later point in time.
However, you can save your analysis results by using one of PatentSight’s → Export Options. It may also be useful to regularly →Tags and Tagging. The set of patent families obtained as search results and used in your analyses. This will allow you to always keep track of the patent population used for a past analysis or found by a past search, even if the legal status, ownership, or evaluation of these patent families have changed over time.