In order to provide comparability of different patent portfolios, all indicators are normalized by averages of patent control groups of the same patent office, same IPC/CPC class and the same publication year. A patent from 2010 filed in the US with the IPC/CPC H04W that e.g. receives 6 foreword citations is compared to the average forward citation counts of all US/2010/H04W patents. If the forward citation count is 6 and the average is 3 the indicator would be 2, meaning twice as high as average.
Normalized indicators allow comparing patent portfolios of different age, technological focus or country. All patent indicators are normalized by 1 and can thus be interpreted as follows:
Value >1 indicates a patent value above technology, country and year average
Value <1 indicates a patent value below technology, country and year average