Week 8: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology

Welcome back to my senior project. This week, we have finished up week 8, and oh boy is there a lot to unpack.

After all this time gathering data, it is finally time to work on putting this data into my Patent Landscape Report, the paper that is in the title of my project. As I said in my first blog, the goal of this paper is to take all the data I have gathered, and give new researchers in this field to have an easy place to know what are the trends in the data, and where to look if they wanted to do research. Now, after 7 weeks of work finding and gathering data, I can finally begin putting this together.

The first step I’m taking is to make graphs out of the data collected. This is what I spent my week on. A website called “ncopat has many tools that can help me do this job, especially with patents that come from China. However, access to Incopat is extremely restricted, and I need a code and a special type of account that I don’t have. The process of getting one of these accounts is extremely complicated, too. Fortunately for me, though, my external advisor’s law firm has access to incopat. However, unfortunately, I can’t use their account while the law firm is using it. Fortunately again though, being back in the US means my timezone is different from theirs, meaning that, as long as I do my research in the middle of the day, everyone at the law firm would (hopefully) be asleep, meaning that I’m free to do my work. This does lock me into a certain time window to do my research, but luckily, that’s when usually do my work anyway. With this set up, I was able to spend the week making the graphs.