Group the patent family for more quick review and analysis

 

A patent has a ‘principle of territoriality’ that is effective only in the country in which it is registered. Even if a patent is registered in one country by examination, there may be cases in which the patent cannot be obtained in another country because patent right is granted in accordance with each country’s examination system. In this way, when a single patent is applied for in several countries, the applications of each country for the basic original application form like a family, so they are called ‘patent family’.

In May of last year, in the webzine #2, we looked at the family analysis feature of WIPS Global. Today we are going to look at the grouping feature which is useful to review patent family.

 Family grouping of WIPS Global is that groups search results by family unit or groups them into one group if there is the same family in the search results. It is possible to quickly review and analyze patents of the same inventor family even in different countries. Now, 100,000 documents can be grouped at once, and duplicated documents can be removed after grouping.

▲ wipsglobal.com> search result

In details (in the picture)

1. You can make it group the same family within the search results,

2. ‘To Extend’ is the grouping after expanding family which includes all families that are not found in the search results but possessed in the searched documents. Extended family documents may bring more results than the original searched documents.

3. This is to set the representative documents to be checked within the family group. You can sort by application date or set the order of countries that require priority review when multiple countries are included in the family documents.

                        ▲ wipsglobal.com> search result > 'To Extend' the patent family

Within one family group, there is one representative family document and sub-documents.

After grouping, you can check it by pressing the ‘+’ button if you want to view the sub-document. As shown in the picture, numbers are sequentially numbered as 4.1, 4.2, 4.3… under the document no.4, so it is easy to distinguish it from the previously read documents.

                                                    ▲ wipsglobal.com> search result

When you want to save the selected family document or analyze with the SmartAngle, you can choose only the representative document or all documents.

                                      ▲ wipsglobal.com> search result > download center

Now we can download the patent family documents. Family documents have the same ‘Family ID’,  so we can check it in the ‘Family ID’ column of the downloaded Excel file. It’s very useful to review the details. However, we should know in advance that the family ID may change depending on the time of download, as family relationships may change over time.