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PATSTAT-KITES database.

PATSTAT (i.e. EPO Worldwide PATent STATistical Database) is a single patent statistics raw database, held by the European Patent Office (EPO) and developed in cooperation with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the OECD and Eurostat. PATSTAT provides raw patent data coming from around 90 patent offices worldwide, including of course the most important and largest ones such as the European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
The data set includes the full set of bibliographic variables concerning each patent application, in particular:

Priority, application, and publication number and dates
Title and abstract
Designated states for protection
Status of application
Main and secondary International Patent Classification (IPC) codes
Applicant’s name and address
Inventors’ names and addresses
References (citations) to prior-art patents and to non-patent literature

A major problem with PATSTAT is that data are provided in a raw format. Data coming from PATSTAT have been therefore thoroughly elaborated by KITES to produce a cleaned and harmonized database: PATSTAT-KITES1. Data processing consisted mainly in a thorough work of cleaning and standardization of rough information provided by the EPO.
Such work of name standardization has been carried out at the level of individual inventors and applicants.
In addition to this, each patent document also reports further information not included in Patstat, (FI concordance tables to convert IPC codes into more aggregated and manageable technological classes2 or NUTS3).
Data included in these reports are for EPO patent office only; last update is from PATSTAT DVD set released on 10/2009; starting date for EPO applications is 1978, bytheway in many reports by priority date you'll meat earlier dates.

Yearly time series (by country, region, or company) always begin with the first year of activity (first year with a non-zero figure) and end with the last year of activity (last year with a non-zero figure).
That is, zero-years are trimmed at both ends of the time series.

1 For a detailed description of the algorithm please refer to Lissoni, Francesco, Gianluca Tarasconi & Bulat Sanditov, 2006, The KEINS Database on Academic Inventors: Methodology and Contents, CESPRI Working Paper 181, Universita' Bocconi.

2 Among them, we have often adopted a technology-oriented classification, jointly elaborated by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft-ISI (Karlsruhe), Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI, Paris) and Observatoire des Sciences and des Techniques (OST, Paris). This classification aggregates all IPC codes into thirty technology fields.

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