Week 3: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology

Good morning. Maybe it isn’t morning for you right now, but it is for me, because I have relocated to China for the second half of my project. Maybe you’re reading this blog in the evening.

This has been a pretty eventful week so far, but it’s simple enough to follow. The first half of the research was mostly setup, as I had to travel to China, meet with my advisor, and discuss plans for the upcoming weeks. For the current part of this project, we are planning to use Google Patents to do a surface level review of the landscape until I can access more sophisticated tools like IncoPat. Google Patents comes with various limitations such as not being able to trace assignees between international patent offices, so for now we will use Google Patents to gather more general data on the leading researchers and assignees on various topics and keywords.

Even if I’m referring to it as “surface level,” however, the research done with Google Patents is not going to be quick or easy. I will be sifting through hundreds of thousands of patents by various measures using advanced search settings. This week, I’ve begun gathering data on various keywords sorted by measures such as priority date, which is the earliest filing date in a family of patent applications, the assignee, which is the person or group whom a patent is filed for, the patent office, the governmental group which oversees patents, and whether the patent is a grant, a secured patent, or an application, a patent not finished being reviewed.

Well, those were a lot of big words, so to summarize, I’m in China doing research on patents, gathering data based on various categorizations that apply to the patents. I will be doing this through Google Patents until I am able to access more sophisticated patent search tools, which I will attempt to acquire next week. Until then, that’s it for now.