Patents and Designs

A patent landscape is an analysis of patent data that reveals business, scientific and technological trends. Landscape reports typically focus on a single industry, technology or geographic region. For more information on how to use and create patent landscapes, see the following articles.

Badger, E. (2008). Techniques for analyzing literature search results. World Patent Information, 30(4), 326‐334.

Bubela, T., Gold, E. R., Graff, G. D., Cahoy, D. R., Nicol, D., & Castle, D. (2013). Patent landscaping for life sciences innovation: Toward consistent and transparent practices. Nature Biotechnology, 31(3), 202-207.

Intellectual Property Office. (2015). The Patent Guide - A Handbook on How to Analyse and Interpret Patent Data. Newport, UK: Intellectual Property Office.

Rees, P. (2004). Patent pictures. Research Information, Jan/Feb, http://www.researchinformation.info/rijanfeb04patents.html.

Taylor, R.P. & Germeraad, P. (2008). Visualize your intellectual property. Research Technology Management, 51(4), 21‐33.

Trippe, A.J. (2003). Patinformatics: Tasks to tools. World Patent Information, 25(3), 211‐221.

Trippe, A. J. (2015). Guidelines for Preparing Patent Landscape Reports. Geneva: World Intellectual Property Organization.

Yang, Y., Akers, L., Klose, T., & Yang, C.B. (2008). Text‐mining and visualization tools – Impressions of emerging capabilities. World Patent Information, 30(4), 280‐293.

Patent landscapes are also published in journals. Use the following databases to locate patent landscape reports in the published literature. A good initial search strategy would include keywords such as "patent" and "landscape" and a term describing the technology, e.g. "solar".

The following databases have good visualization capabilities.