Elsevier

Computers & Chemical Engineering

Volume 123, 6 April 2019, Pages 317-330
Computers & Chemical Engineering

Evaluating and ranking patents with multiple criteria: How many criteria are required to find the most promising patents?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compchemeng.2019.01.011Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A novel methodology to evaluate and rank patents is proposed.

  • We propose eight criteria to rank patents.

  • An intuitive linear optimization formulation is proposed to determine criteria weights.

  • We automated and tested our methodology in a web-based decision support system.

  • We validate our methodology through several studies in chemical R&D analytics.

Abstract

Patents contain a wealth of information about technological progress and market trends. Many existing techniques for patent assessment rely on citation analysis. Despite its importance, citation analysis alone is not adequate to identify all important patents for a given topic. We propose the simultaneous use of eight criteria for patent ranking and evaluation. Additionally, we investigate computationally the effect on ranking quality when fewer than eight criteria are utilized. Contrary to previous approaches, the proposed methodology does not require expert opinions to weigh the different criteria and evaluate the patents. The solution of an intuitive linear optimization problem provides optimal weights for the proposed criteria. These weights are subsequently utilized in a systematic multicriteria methodology for patent ranking. The proposed methodology has been implemented in a web-based decision support system and has been validated in the context of identifying the most important patents for the production of twenty-two chemicals.

Introduction

Patents contain a wealth of information about technological progress and market trends. Although patent documents have a well-defined format, they are lengthy and include many technical terms, which requires significant effort to analyze. Hence, an entire research area, called patent mining or patent analysis, aims to assist patent analysts and policy makers in finding, processing, and analyzing patents. Patent analysis can reveal market trends and novel industrial solutions that can lead to investment decisions (Campbell, 1983).

The basic tasks that a patent mining system performs are Zhang et al. (2015):

  • Patent search and retrieval: the system searches for relevant patents from patent databases according to a keyword/phrase. Natural language processing and data mining methods have been used to improve the relevance of the returned results for a query (Konishi, 2005, Mahdabi, Keikha, Gerani, Landoni, Crestani, 2011, Sheremetyeva, 2003, Shinmori, Okumura, Marukawa, Iwayama, 2003, Stein, Hoppe, Gollub, 2012, Tannebaum, Rauber, 2012, Xu, Croft, 1996, Zhang, Liu, Li, Shen, Li, 2017a).

  • Patent visualization: patents are presented in ways that help analysts understand key relationships and concepts. Graph theory, network analysis, and text mining methods have been applied to visualize patents that contain both structured and unstructured data (Huang, Chiang, Chen, 2003, Kim, Suh, Park, 2008, Lee, Yoon, Park, 2009, Tang, Wang, Yang, Hu, Zhao, Yan, Gao, Huang, Xu, Li, et al., 2012, Yoon, Park, 2004, Yoon, Yoon, Park, 2002, Yoon, Seo, Coh, Song, Lee, 2017).

  • Patent evaluation: patents are evaluated according to their importance or potential. This challenging but important task can help decision makers invest in new novel industrial solutions. Natural language processing and data mining methods have been used for patent evaluation (Fujii, 2007, Hu, Huang, Xu, Li, Usadi, Zhu, 2012, Liu, Hseuh, Lawrence, Meliksetian, Perlich, Veen, 2011) (a detailed literature review is provided in Section 2). The most frequently used technique is citation analysis (Albert, Avery, Narin, McAllister, 1991, Ellis, Hepburn, Oppenhein, 1978). Although citation analysis can reveal a seminal discovery through the number of citations that a patent received, it may miss important recently issued patents.

In this paper, we propose a new methodology for patent evaluation and ranking. Our methodology takes into account several pieces of information about patents, including citation counts, pagerank, and the existence of clusters in citation graphs. The relative importance of the proposed criteria is determined through the solution of a linear optimization model that provides weights that satisfy a number of intuitive constraints amongst the proposed criteria. These weights constitute the main ingredients of a systematic patent evaluation and ranking method that utilizes the multicriteria methodology TOPSIS (Hwang and Yoon, 1981). The proposed approach represents the first multiple criteria approach to patent evaluation and ranking that does not require estimations from decision makers. Instead, we rely on common sense constraints that are easier to argue and negotiate between experts. Additionally, we investigate computationally the impact of the number of criteria used to evaluate patents. These computations reveal that at least five criteria are needed to obtain somewhat similar rankings and that none of the eight proposed criteria is redundant in the sense that their inclusion in the model leads to different rankings.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present a literature review on patent evaluation and ranking techniques. Section 3 details the proposed methodology. Section 4 describes a computational implementation of the proposed approach in a web-based decision support system. Section 5 presents computational experiments, including finding the most important patents for the production processes of twenty-two chemicals. Conclusions from this research are presented in Section 6.

Section snippets

Related work

Patent evaluation techniques aim to support decision makers by assessing the quality of patents. Most existing works have relied on citations to rank patents. This includes forward citations, i.e., citations received by a patent from patents granted at a subsequent point in time, and backward citations, i.e., citations given by a patent to patents granted at an earlier time. Previous studies Trajtenberg (1990), Harhoff et al. (1999) and Hall, Jaffe, Trajtenberg, 2005, Hall, Jaffe, Trajtenberg,

Patent search and retrieval

The aim of the first step of our methodology is to search and retrieve patents relevant to a given query. The Quid software (Quid Inc.) is used for this task. Quid is a business intelligence platform that assists decision making through visualization of complex and unstructured information. Among other features, Quid can find relevant patents according to a user query. Quid analyzes interactions among collected patents and represents patent relationships as a network map. The software uses

Decision support system

In order to facilitate application and validation of the proposed methodology, we have implemented a web-based decision support system (DSS). The DSS has been implemented using PHP, MySQL, Ajax, and jQuery. Fig. 2 presents the decision-making process that a decision maker can follow in order to retrieve and rank patents according to a specific query. Initially, the decision maker submits a query to find relevant patents using Quid. Then, the decision maker reviews the collected patents and

Computational experiments

We illustrate the proposed methodology to find the most novel patents that describe new processes to produce three well-known chemicals:

  • 1.

    ammonia process synthesis

  • 2.

    olefin synthesis

  • 3.

    polyethylene synthesis.

After exporting patent data from Quid, we upload each case to our DSS. Three different sets of weights, denoted here as sets A, B and C, were used to rank the patents for each case. Sets A and B correspond to the two solution points of the linear optimization formulation presented in Section 3.4.

Conclusions

We presented a methodology to rank patents based on multiple criteria and an intuitive linear optimization formulation that reveals how to weigh different criteria. We also implemented a web-based decision support system to automate the proposed methodology. This system was used to validate the methodology in the context of finding the most important patents that describe new processes for three well-known chemicals: (i) ammonia process synthesis, (ii) olefin synthesis, and (iii) direct

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