Tagging is an important tool that allows to define and analyze groups of patents which are otherwise difficult to isolate via the filter settings, such as business units, subsidiaries or internal technology classifications.
Tagging can also be used to add internal or external information to a patent family, such as internal reference numbers, which can later be displayed to ease mapping of patents.
The PatentSight BI offers four ways to create tags:

Tagging the results of filter settings allows you to save your search results for later analyses.
With the Tagging Tool, which is embedded in the Result List, you can create and edit tags while browsing through your search results in the Result List.
The option Import patents to Tag allows you to import a large number of patents into the PatentSight BI, alongside with internal or external information (optional). This option allows you to review and edit mismatched patent numbers.
The option Quick import search results allows you to import patent numbers directly into the search filter – the tag will be saved automatically, however, there is no option to review or edit mismatched patent numbers during the import process.

Note: Please be aware that tags are static. E.g., if you have tagged a technology field and later new patents are filed in that field, these patents will not be added to your tag automatically.

Tag Search Results: Tagging From Filter

You might want to tag the results of a certain combination of filter settings to add additional information to these patent families or to have them available as a group for further analysis.

To tag the result of a filter search, click on "Tag" in the upper menu of the search filter:

From here, you can either create a new tag or add/remove patents to/from an existing tag.

Option 1) Create new tag:

Option 2) Add/remove patents to/from an existing tag:

Tagging Tool: Tagging From Result List

How to Access the Tagging Tool in the Result List

Open the Result List:

The Tagging Tool is embedded at the bottom of the Result List:

To activate the Tagging Tool, click on "Click here to tag patents...".

How to Add Tags to the Tagging Tool

To add tags to the Tagging Tool, click on "Add":

Select the tag(s) you want to add to the Tagging Tool or create a new tag:

You can add up to 10 tags to the Tagging Tool at once:

The tags selected will be added to the Tagging Tool:

The tags added to the Tagging Tool are identified by numbers:

How to Use the Tagging Tool in the Result List

The interface of the Tagging Tool allows you to add or remove tags at any time:

You can also change the numerical order of the tags in the Tagging Tool:

Moreover, you can decide to hide or show the Tagging Tool options:

Click on the respective tag number to add a patent family to a tag:

Alternatively, you can use the arrow keys of your keyboard to navigate through the Result List and the number keys to add or remove tags from/to patent families:

Finally, you can select and tag multiple patent families at once:

All you need to do is make your selection and then press the respective tag number on your keyboard:

By pressing e.g. the number "4" on your keyboard, all patents selected will be added to the tag with displayed with the number 4 in the Tagging Tool. If you press the same number again, the patents selected will be removed from the tag with the number 4.

Note: The tags in the Tagging Tool are updated automatically as you work with the tool – thus, there is no need to save your changes.

Import Patents to Tag

Tags are also useful to match external information, e.g., classifications out of your IP management system for your own IP or other search tools for third-party IP.

To incorporate this information into the PatentSight BI, you can use the import option “Import patents to Tag“.

Note: Make sure to import either application numbers or publication numbers or patent numbers. Avoid importing different types of numbers at once. For more details on the importable number format, click HERE.

In the next step, you can verify if all you patent numbers have been matched:

Finally, select the folder in which you want your tag to be saved:

Organizing tags can be carried out as described below:

Edit Mismatched External Patent Numbers

In some cases, a list of external patent numbers might include patent numbers, which cannot be matched.

You can review mismatched patent numbers and edit them:

Once a number has been matched, its row will be highlighted in green:

Now that all numbers imported have been matched, you can move on and create your tag:

Upload Internal Information With Tags – A Use Case

With the function “Import Patents to Tag” you can add internal or external information to patent families and sort them into different tags and have them saved in a specified folder.

Use Case: Assign patents to Business Units
Business Unit 1 has two subunits, Subunit A and Subunit B. Each subunit has five patents. We want to analyze Business Unit 1 as a whole. Moreover, we want to analyze Subunit A and Subunit B individually and to compare these subunits to each other and to Business Unit 1.

To do so, we want to create two folders and three tags:

a folder called “Business Unit”,
a subfolder called “Subunits” within the folder “Business Unit”,
a tag called “Business Unit 1” containing all 10 patents of both subunits and saved in the folder “Business Unit”,
a tag called “Subunit A” containing the 5 patents of Subunit A and saved in the subfolder “Subunits”, and
a tag called “Subunit B” containing the 5 patents of Subunit B and saved in the subfolder “Subunits”.

To create the desired tags and folder structure, first, it is necessary to create an Excel sheet that contains the information you want to import:

Click HERE to download Sample Data (Excel) for Import Patents To Tag.

Hashtags (“#”) are used to indicate to the PatentSight BI that tags (and folders) are supposed to be created. Backslashes (“\”) are used to setup a folder structure including subfolders.
In Column B the term before the backslash is the name of the folder. The term after the backslash is the name of the tag. In Column C, a second backlash is inserted to create the subfolder “Subunits” within the folder “Business Unit”. You can use as many backslashes as necessary to create more subfolders. The last term is always the tag name.

Note: If there are mismatched patent numbers, you can edit them as described above. For an overview of importable number formats, click HERE.

You can share your tags with your colleagues and give them read/write/admin rights

Note: If you want to share a workbook that contains tags with a colleague, you can save and give them the read/write/admin rights for both workbook and tags, and send them the URL. This will allow them to view/edit the workbook according to the rights given by you, to see the detail of tags you made and to keep working upon your work.

Good to know:

When preparing your Excel file to import patents to tag, you do not necessarily have to use one cell per piece of information.

Example 1
For example, using semicolons you can list all patent numbers that should have the same tag within one cell:

Importing the information shown above (A1 to B3) will create the folder "Departments" with the three tags (Department 1, Department 2, Department 3) each containing the patents stated in the respective row.

Example 2
You can also place the information on the tags and folders into the same cell as your patent number(s):

PatentSight will recognize the hashtag as divider without having to split this information into different cells.

Example 3
Moreover, you can use the above principle to include information on both multiple patents and multiple tags in one cell:

Importing the information shown above will create three folders that contain the respective tags with the respective patents:

Using Tags in Your Analysis

Tags as Filter Element

You can also work with tags as filter element

Note: By default, many charts are grouped by “Owner”. To analyze the patents in your tags, you need to select “Tag” as grouping.

Tag Categories

Tag categories allow to sort your tags into three categories

Often it is interesting to show the tags a patent family is carrying. Depending on the patent family this might be a lot of tags. Furthermore, there might be use cases for which you are only interested in a specific set of tags a patent family carries. To categorize your tags, you can sort them into three defined tag categories.

As is not possible to use the same grouping twice in any chart or table, you can also use the tag categories as grouping instead. For example you can show overlaps between tags from different tag-categories. If you used the grouping “Tag (co-assignment)”, you may not be able to determine the tags shown as all co-assigned tags will be displayed.

The tag-categories PatentSight offers are called Application, Product and Technology.

To create tag categories, create folders called “Application”, “Product” and/or “Technology” and save tags in these folders

Use tag categories to show a specific set of tags a patent family carries instead of all co-assigned tags

As it is not possible to use the same grouping twice you can use the grouping “Tag (co-assignment)” to analyze overlaps between tags

However, there are use cases for which you only want to analyze the overlaps between the tags of specific categories, especially when a patent family carries a lot of tags

All tags saved under any folder called “Application”, “Technology” or “Product” will be considered within a tag category

Make sure only tags you want to see in a tag-category are saved in the corresponding tag category folder