The Reporting Date Concept

In this section, you will learn about the Reporting Date concept and how PatentSight applies this.

Last updated: June 2021

Introduction

Using the Reporting Date

Reproducibility of Past Analyses at Later Dates

Introduction

The Reporting Date concept allows us to "travel back in time" and analyze the patent landscape as it was in the past. Each Reporting Date is a moment in time for which the evaluation of a patent portfolio or a patent family is done.

The current Reporting Date shows us the state of the world as it is now. The current Reporting Date changes weekly with each update of the PatentSight database. The older Reporting Dates are each set for the end of every year (December 31). Currently, 21 past Reporting Dates are available reaching back to the year 2000.

For any selected Reporting Date, only patent families that were active at that particular date are taken into account for the analysis.  Active patent families are defined as all patent families with at least one alive member – this can be either a pending patent application or an active granted (= in force) patent.

Moreover, for any Reporting Date selected, no information other than the information that was already available at that point in time is considered for the calculation of our metrics. This includes citation data or other information used to calculate our indicators. The only exception is patent ownership information – for any given Reporting Date, the owner of a patent family is always the current Ultimate Owner even if the patent family had belonged to a different entity in the past. Moreover, in cases where we receive information that should have been available at a past date or where data has been corrected, information may change retrospectively.

E.g., selecting the Reporting Date "2003/12/31" means that no patent families that were published in 2004 or later are considered for analysis. It also means that the Market Coverage for the patent families that were active on "2003/12/31" is calculated using the GNI values corresponding to that particular year – and not the current values. 

Using the Reporting Date

Search Filter

To apply a past Reporting Date to your search filter in order to "travel back in time", click on the Reporting Date displayed at the bottom of the search filter and select a Reporting Date of interest.

Charts and Tables

Past Reporting Dates can also be displayed in charts and tables by applying the attribute "Reporting Date". For example, the analysis template "Patent Asset Index Trend" that  shows how the Patent Asset Index™ of any given portfolio has developed over time. I.e., it shows the Patent Asset Index™ of all patent families that were active at each point in time calculated based on the Competitive Impact (Market Coverage x Technology Relevance) of each of these patent families at this point in time.

Another example for the usage of the  Reporting Date within charts are the bubble trails that can be displayed in bubble charts.

You can also add the attribute "Reporting Date" to a table.

Reproducibility of Past Analyses at Later Dates

Since patent data is “alive” and the database is constantly updated and improved, the exact reproduction of an analysis result from the past may not be possible at a later point in time. 

However, you can save your analysis results by using one of our → export options. It might also be useful to regularly → tag the set of patent families used in an analysis. This way you can always reproduce a patent population used for a past analysis or found by a past search, even if the legal status, ownership, and evaluations of these patent families has changed at a later point in time.