The EPO celebrates the success of 20 years of PATSTAT

On 12 June, the latest PATSTAT version was released, marking the 20^th anniversary of the EPO’s global patent database. During this period, it has become a reliable and powerful source for statisticians and decision-makers worldwide. Its impact and popularity can be seen from the ever-growing number of PATSTAT related publications, for example on Google Scholar. Now freely accessible in the Technology Intelligence Platform, PATSTAT has reached another milestone, enabling easy interoperability of its data with other datasets. 

With bibliographic and legal event patent data for more than 130 million patent applications worldwide, the EPO's PATSTAT database has become a global standard in the field of patent intelligence and statistics. PATSTAT is the de facto reference database for studies integrating patent data, both in academic research and among major organisations such as the OECD, World Bank, European Commission or International Energy Agency. Recent statistics from Google Scholar are testament to PATSTAT’s impact, with the number of research publications referencing PATSTAT steadily increasing over the past twenty years. This year, it exceeded the 6 000 threshold for the first time. Today, PATSTAT is also available via the EPO’s recently launched Technology Intelligence Platform (TIP) - a free cloud-based system where users can interact with PATSTAT and other data sets using Jupyter notebooks and the Python programming language. Six months after its launch, over a thousand users have already registered for TIP opening a wide range of exciting new opportunities for exploiting PATSTAT. Expect to see even greater impact in the years! 

Fig. 1: Searching Google Scholar with *patstat AND (epo OR epa OR oeb OR patent OR brevet)* not including citations 

Keywords: PATSTAT, Technology Intelligence Platform, patent analytics, statistics