Geocoding of Worldwide Patent Data Descriptor Data Gaétan De Rassenfosse 1, Jan Kozak1 & Florian Seliger 2*

www.nature.com/scientificdata OPEN Geocoding of worldwide patent DATA DESCRIPTOR data Gaétan de Rassenfosse 1, Jan Kozak1 & Florian Seliger 2* The dataset provides geographic coordinates for inventor and applicant locations in 18.8 million patent documents spanning over more than 30 years. The geocoded data are further allocated to the corresponding countries, regions and cities. When the address information was missing in the original patent document, we imputed it by using information from subsequent flings in the patent family. The resulting database can be used to study patenting activity at a fne-grained geographic level without creating bias towards the traditional, established patent ofces. Background & Summary Patents are jurisdictional rights, and applicants willing to protect an invention internationally must fle individual patent applications in all countries where they seek protection. Te patent document that frst describes the invention is usually called the ‘priority fling’ or ‘frst fling’ (or priority patent application) and the patent documents subsequently fled in other jurisdictions are called ‘second flings.’ In 2010, there were 2.5 million patent applications fled worldwide. About 1 million of these were frst flings, i.e. new inventions submitted for patent protection—the rest was second flings. Te goal of this project has been to produce a dataset of frst flings fled across the globe and to allocate them by inventor and applicant location. Te patent data relate exclusively to invention patents, and exclude, e.g., plant patents and designs (sometimes called utility models or petty patents). For example, the database allows identifying all patented inventions by inventors located in Switzerland (or in a specifc region in Switzerland), regardless of the patent ofce at which the applications are fled. In many academic studies and policy reports, patenting activity is measured at a single patent ofce such as the European Patent Ofce (EPO) or the United States Patent and Trademark Ofce (USPTO)1,2. But these ofces only attract a selected set of patented inventions. For example, our data suggest that less than 30 percent of all frst flings by Swiss inventors in 2010 were fled at the EPO. Obtaining precise geographic information is important for several reasons. First, since knowledge spillovers are concentrated locally and decay fast with geographical distance3,4, a high level of granularity is desirable for such studies. Second, innovative activity is usually distributed very unequally within countries and a small number of cities and regions account for most of the patent applications5. In addition, the worldwide coverage of the data enables institutional research on innovation activities in emerging or developing economies6, which are overlooked in the literature. Tird, policymakers are increasingly interested in location decisions of frms and high-skilled labor7. For this purpose, it is important to know where the major innovation hubs are located. Geographic coordinates allow for a variety of geographic distance calculations, spatial clustering and visuali- zations. Accurate geolocation data also serve other purposes such as tracking inventor mobility8 or improving disambiguation algorithms9. Te present work draws on the Worldwide Count of Priority Patent Applications (WCPPA) proposed in de Rassenfosse et al.10, but extends it both in scope and in depth. First, whereas the original work exploited information from one patent database (PATSTAT), we have combined information from nine national, regional and international patent databases. Ofentimes, address information is missing from the PATSTAT database and the consideration of several databases has improved data coverage substantially. Second, we provide a more fne-grained localization measure. Whereas the original work allocated patents to inventor and applicant countries, the present work allocates patents to precise geographic coordinates using the full address information. It also assigns each address to corresponding countries, regions and cities. Te resulting dataset enables researchers to identify, say, how many inventions (that is, frst flings) related to chemistry were produced in the area of Kanpur, India in year 2010. Overall, we have collected and geocoded 7 million inventor and applicant addresses 1Chair of Innovation and Intellectual Property Policy, College Management of Technology, Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. 2KOF Swiss Economic Institute, Department of Management, Technology, and Economics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. *email: [email protected] SCIENTIFIC DATA | (2019) 6:260 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-019-0264-6 1 www.nature.com/scientificdata/ www.nature.com/scientificdata 1. Data Acquision: Collecng and cleaning raw address data from nine sources Japanese Korean Chinese German French UK PATSTAT WIPO REGPAT Patent Patent Patent Patent Patent Patent Office Office Office Office Office Office Patent Data Project 2. Geolocaon: Geocoding addresses, processing and manual cleaning PatentsView Geonames 3. Regionalizaon: Assignment of regions and cies to coordinates GADM 4. Final Data Assembly: Imputaon of missing informaon on applicant and inventor locaons for first filings using patent family Notes: Grey boxes indicate data sources. PATSTAT provides informaon on the EPO and the USPTO as well as on smaller patent offices. WIPO stands for the World Intellectual Property Organizaon. Fig. 1 Schematic Overview of the Data Generation Process. from 18.8 million frst flings invented in 46 countries and fled between 1980 and 2014. Te dataset has a high coverage: it covers 81 percent of all frst flings applied for across the globe over the considered time period. Researchers focusing on regions traditionally use the OECD REGPAT database, which ofers a regional break- down of patent applications fled at the EPO and at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)11. REGPAT also provides information on postal codes and city names from the addresses listed in the patent documents at these two ofces. Tis database has been widely used in academic studies12–15 and policy reports16,17, yet it represents a selected set of patents that refects a fraction of overall patenting activity. Te present dataset con- siderably expands REGPAT. It enables counting the number of frst flings for 54,583 cities across the globe and for administrative divisions at diferent levels of precision (e.g., regions, departments, arrondissements, and com- munes in France or states (Länder), governmental districts, districts (Kreise), and municipalities in Germany). Te Supplementary File 1 provides a table that ofers a more systematic comparison between the present work and earlier works. Figure 1 provides an overview of the data generation process, which consists of four main stages. Stage 1 relates to the acquisition and cleaning of address data from several data sources. Te objective is to prepare a list of all addresses available in the relevant patent documents to be used for geolocation. Tese patent documents do not all correspond to frst flings. Tey also include second flings. Stage 2 concerns the geolocation. We feed all addresses to a commercial geolocation service and perform extensive cleaning of the returned results. We replenish ambiguous, missing and wrong information with external data (Geonames and PatentsView). Stage 3 involves the regionalization. We allocate all addresses to a country, a city and administrative area(s). Stage 4 deals with fnal data assembly. We assign all patent documents into the families to which they belong, and use family information to fnd the address for the frst flings. Extensive data quality checks suggest that the information provided is highly accurate overall. Data quality for China could be improved with better raw data becoming available from ofcial sources. Te resulting dataset includes all frst flings and the associated geographic information. Te data are distributed as a set of txt fles that have been designed for easy interoperability with two major patent databases. Te dataset natively connects to the PATSTAT database, and the data release also includes a bridge table to connect to USPTO’s database PatentsView and other national patent databases. Note that the datasets do not contain information on individual inventors and applicants. Tey contain geolocation data for inventors and applicants but do not allow identifying actual individual inventors and applicants. Sometimes, address data are missing in the original patent documents and we recover them from subsequent flings—this trick prevents us from linking inventors and applicants listed in the original patent documents to their addresses in a consistent manner. Furthermore, disambiguating inventors and applicants is a particularly challenging task and forms a research project on its own8. Te remainder of this document describes the four steps of the data generation process in detail (Methods section), presents the organization of the final dataset and discusses coverage (Data Records), explores data quality (Technical Validation) and provides usage information (Usage Notes). Methods Stage 1: data acquisition. Te data collection involved building a large database of patent flings along with their corresponding applicant and inventor addresses from the major patent ofces. We focus on 46 inventor and applicant countries that represent all OECD, EU28 and BRICS countries and account for more than 99 percent of all frst flings

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