Detailed information on almost 3 million U.S. patents granted between January 1963 and December 1999, all citations made to these patents between 1975 and 1999 (over 16 million), and a reasonably broad match of patents to Compustat (the data set of all firms traded in the U.S. stock market).
Update: The NBER is working on a major NSF-funded update and extension of this data. A new release of these files, bringing existing data up to date through December 2004, is anticipated for 2010 or 2011. A variety of additional fields and indexes will also be provided. These are anticipated to include "link-out" tables connecting patent numbers to geographic entities (e.g. SMSAs), and a codification of inventor names.
Data
These data are described in detail in
Hall, B. H., A. B. Jaffe, and M. Tratjenberg (2001). "The NBER Patent Citation Data File: Lessons, Insights and Methodological Tools." NBER Working Paper 8498.
ALL USERS OF THESE DATA SHOULD READ THIS PAPER, AND SHOULD CITE IT AS THE SOURCE OF THE DATA
...
The data are freely available below in two compressed (".zip") formats: SAS transport (.tpt) files and ASCII comma-separated variable (.csv) files. The program read_tpt.sas can be used to convert the .tpt files to native SAS data sets. Lines in the ASCII CSV files are terminated by the newline character "\n". "CSV" stands for comma separated values. All values in the ASCII CSV files are separated by commas. In addition, the character values are enclosed by double quotes. The compression ratio for the compressed files is about 75%. The ".zip" files can be uncompressed with winzip or pkunzip. To check your ability to uncompress these files, download the small file compress.zip. The SAS ".tpt" files are transferable to other formats using software such as Stat/Transfer or DBMS/Copy
Datasets
Description
Documentation
Data -- Pkzipped
SAS .tpt
ASCII CSV
Overview
overview.txt
--
Pairwise citations data
Cite75_99.txt
Cite75_99.zip -- (68 Mb)
acite75_99.zip -- (82 Mb)
Patent data, including constructed variables
pat63_99.txt
pat63_99.zip -- (90Mb)
apat63_99.zip -- (56Mb)
Assignee names
coname.txt
coname.zip -- (2Mb)
aconame.zip -- (2Mb)
Contains the match to CUSIP numbers
match.txt
match.zip -- (130Kb)
amatch.zip -- (98Kb)
Individual inventor records
inventor.txt
inventor.zip -- (98Mb)
ainventor.zip -- (82Mb)
Class codes with corresponding class names
classes.txt
--
Country codes with corresponding country names
countries.txt
Class, technological category, and technological subcategory
crosswalk
class_match.txt
Technological category and subcategory labels
subcategory.txt
--
subcategory.csv
SAS program to convert .tpt files to native SAS format
read_tpt.sas
U.S. Patent Classification (USPC) System and the Standard Industrial Code (SIC) System
Openness: OPEN
- License: OK. (PD)
- Access: yes. Good docs and open formats.
