The dataset provides geographic coordinates for inventor and applicant locations found in 18.8 million patent documents that were filed in years 1980 through 2014. It combines information from nine national, regional and international patent databases and covers 81 percent of all first filings applied for across the globe over the considered time period.

7 million inventor and applicant addresses from 46 countries were collected, geocoded and  allocated to the corresponding countries, regions and cities.

 

When the address information was missing in the original document (priority filing), it was imputed using information from subsequent filings in the patent family.

 

The resulting database can be used to study patenting activity at a fine-grained geographic level without creating bias towards the traditional, established patent offices. 

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The database allows for example to identify all patented inventions by inventors located in a given country, regardless of the patent office at which the applications for these inventions were filed.

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Patenting activity is often measured at a single patent office such as the European Patent Office (EPO) or the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). But these offices only attract a selected set of patented inventions. For example, we estimate that less than 40 percent of all priority filings by Swiss inventors in 2010 were filed at the EPO.