SciVal Metric: Patents Count and Main Patent Family Count

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There are two patent counts:

• Patents Count

• Main Patent Family Count

Learn more about patent families.

Patents Count

This is the count of Patents citing the Scholarly Output published by the entity (e.g. a university) in which you are looking.

The count of Patents may be higher than the number of Scholarly Outputs cited, since multiple Patents could refer to the same piece of output.

The count of outputs may be higher than the number of Patents since one patent can refer to multiple Scholarly Outputs.

Example: 200 Patents have cited articles published by Athena University over the past five years. The Patent Count metric equals 200.

The Patent Counts metric is deduplicated at a Patent Office level using the Domestic Patent Family. It includes all subsequent publications of the same application within the same authority, i.e. documents that all share the same application number. 

Out of the 107 Patent Offices covered by SciVal, 43 provide their citation information. This means only 43 of the Patent Offices can contribute to the Patents Count metric.

Main Patent Family Count

The Main Patent Family includes a set of patent documents filed in multiple countries to protect a single invention by common inventors. All documents have exactly the same priority or combination of priorities.

The Main Patent Family Count will always be less than or equal to the Patents Count. It can never be a higher count, because it is a deduplicated count of the Patents Count.

The Main Patent Family Count serves 2 distinct use cases:

1. It provides a count of the unique inventions that are citing the research from your entity
2. It makes hidden Patent Offices visible

Main Patent Family - makes hidden Patent Offices visible

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