Obstacles to prior art searching by the trilateral patent offices: empirical evidence from International Search Reports.
Obstacles to prior art searching by the trilateral patent offices: empirical evidence from International Search Reports.
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DOI：
10.1007/s11192-016-1858-9
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
3.9
通讯作者：
Wada T
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Wada T
尽管已经对审查员专利引证进行了许多实证研究，但很少有人仔细研究在专利局专利申请期间添加专利引证时对现有技术检索的障碍。该分析利用了专利合作条约（PCT）要求的国际检索报告（ISR）与随后的国家审查程序之间的纵向差距。我们研究了几种距离是否实际上影响了 ISR 时现有技术被检测到的概率；这比国家阶段考试发生得早得多。根据 2002 年至 2005 年三边专利局（欧洲专利局、美国专利商标局和日本专利局）的三方 PCT 申请以及三边局做出的族级引用，我们发现有证据表明地理距离对 ISR 中捕获在先专利的可能性产生负面影响。此外，申请的技术复杂性会对捕获概率产生负面影响，而现有技术的前向引用量会对捕获概率产生积极影响。这些结果表明专利局检索存在障碍，并提出了设计专利局工作共享的方法，以便仅当专利局检索范围重叠时才会出现检索成本的重复。
Despite many empirical studies having been carried out on examiner patent citations, few have scrutinized the obstacles to prior art searching when adding patent citations during patent prosecution at patent offices. This analysis takes advantage of the longitudinal gap between an International Search Report (ISR) as required by the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and subsequent national examination procedures. We investigate whether several kinds of distance actually affect the probability that prior art is detected at the time of an ISR; this occurs much earlier than in national phase examinations. Based on triadic PCT applications between 2002 and 2005 for the trilateral patent offices (the European Patent Office, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the Japan Patent Office) and their family-level citations made by the trilateral offices, we find evidence that geographical distance negatively affects the probability of capture of prior patents in an ISR. In addition, the technological complexity of an application negatively affects the probability of capture, whereas the volume of forward citations of prior art affects it positively. These results demonstrate the presence of obstacles to searching at patent offices, and suggest ways to design work sharing by patent offices, such that the duplication of search costs arises only when patent office search horizons overlap.