Patent analysis tools are developed to provide holistic delivery information and intelligence around patents. They are mostly distinguished in terms of their features and delivery capabilities. In an Intellectual Property and Data Management organization if you are looking for a particular Patent tool to serve the purpose of your organization then ideally what should you be looking out for?  Here is the overview of the various important features found in the most comprehensive patent data analysis tool and what components should you look out for while deciding upon during the evaluation process.

1)      Search capabilities: Why should one look out for search analysis in the patent analysis tool when most of the search is already done in the database?  This can be further elucidated with the answer to another question.  What is search in patent analysis? Searching is usually a requirement for custom portfolio, categorization and further it is absolutely critical when going ahead with deeper analysis. Even when looking at a chart, it is important to be able to immediately drill-down from the chart and search through the segmented portion to get to the answer or insight you seek. Finally at lot of time it is absolutely essential to have custom fields such as tags, comments etc. These requirements make it essential to have reliable search capabilities in the analysis tool that you are opting for.

2)      Patent Text mining functions: When working with sets of 10000 records or more if you want to quickly understand what locate topics of interest or sometimes even understand which topics are prominent across the set and what sub-topics they are associated with, a powerful tunable auto-categorization engine is a must. Solutions that are created specifically for mining and clustering patent text are better suited than more general text mining solutions. Generating keyword lists and using such list for statistical analysis is another popular method used to gain insights on trends across companies, inventors and their patents.

3)      Analytics capabilities: One of the major capabilities that should be under the coverage of a patent analysis tool is a co occurrence matrix generating top lists and citation analysis. This feature helps in analysis and spotting trends within certain specific trends or technologies to have better insights into the future of these trends. It’s always good to get a few analytics questions that your organization has, tested and verified using the analytics capabilities so that you are sure if the solution is up to the task of handling your patent intelligence needs.

There are more to the list which one should keep in their mind while looking for a patent analysis tool such as data export features, associating own custom fields with patent data, rating and scoring system. Details analysis of these trends and characteristic features will come up in our next post, a continuation to ‘Key features of patent analysis tool part 2’.