What does Micropatent do with patent families
July 7th, 2009 — samir
Here is the explanation:
For this option “Reduce to One Member per Family” we use the default order US-WO-EP-JP-GB-DE-FR for selecting the representative document, the Worksheet retains only one family member and deletes the other patents from the list. This feature gives you the basis for analysis of patents by family, eliminating the distortion that results from counting the same invention in each country. This is how we determine what document to keep. In each family, documents are sorted by country code, in order of preference: US WO EP JP GB DE FR. The first group of patents or authority (let’s say there are multiple US documents) is then sorted by date (oldest first) and then we choose the first record or oldest record.