Posts Tagged: "Patent Text"

40 Years of Patent Trends

To uncover and visualize underlying trends in the subject matter of patents, we analyzed four decades of data from the USPTO PAIR database, from 1977 through 2016, inclusive. Extracting the title of each granted patent or application and the date it was filed yields 493 megabytes of data, comprising 7.7 million records and 59.8 million words… The pronounced shift from blue words to orange words in the animated visualization suggests a major trend in the last 40 years away from patents related to materials and machines (as signified by words such as “compounds,” “machine,” and “valve”) and toward patents related to information (as signified by words such as “display,” “image,” and “processing”).