Week 6: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology

After a week off from staring at names on an excel sheet, I’ve finally returned to continue my job of starting at names on an excel sheet, this time with new strategies in mind. Because the data I collected was on the patent landscape in china, the majority of results I found had their titles and descriptions in chinese, which, unfortunately, I cannot read. Probably should have thought of this problem arising when I decided to do a project on patent law in China. Regardless, I have to work around this problem and find a solution.

The main complication this gives rise to is that it makes things very difficult for me to find keywords in the articles. I’m going to need those keywords in order to get numbers on them for the project, so I had to do something. I decided that google translating each article title in the spreadsheet would be easier than learning how to read chinese in the next five weeks, so I began working at it.

Perhaps I should have realized a little sooner that I have a daunting task to accomplish. I had to think through a lot of possibilities before I finally saw some light.  After two perfectly good days spent copy pasting patent titles in and out of google translate, I finally thought of a better idea. I realized that if data on keywords was what I needed, I could simply look for chinese keywords, and get the numbers on keywords in chinese. With this new idea, I messaged my external advisor, and asked him for suggestions on keywords, as well as their definitions. With this roadblock out of the way, I was finally able to contine staring at names on an excel sheet. I hope to make good progress now.