Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx)

The latest version of PatEx (referred to below as the 2022 release) contains detailed information on more than 13 million publicly-viewable provisional and non-provisional patent applications to the USPTO and over 1 million Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications. It is based on data that OCE downloaded from the Patent Examination Data System (PEDS) in June, 2023. 

New files for 2022

The 2022 PatEx release includes some information that has not been made available in previous years. The release includes data on patent applicants in addition to inventors (all_applicants). It includes metadata on patent examination-related documents which are sourced from the CMS (cms_documents and cms_document_codes). An addendum to the technical documentation briefly describes these new data files.

2019 Release

The PEDS data are sourced from Public PAIR. The first time that OCE used PEDS as the basis of PatEx was for the 2019 release. We took the PEDS data and organized it into the familiar PatEx data files, which are based on the organization of the legacy Public PAIR portal. The data files include information on each application’s characteristics, prosecution history, continuation history, claims of foreign priority, patent term adjustment history, publication history, and correspondence address information. 

There are some minor differences between the post-2019 PatEx releases and those prior to 2019. Because of this, we provided new technical documentation for the 2019 release.

Technical documentation for the PatEx releases based on PEDS (the 2019 release to present) can be cited as:  Miller, Richard D., Technical Documentation for the 2019 Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx) Release. USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-4.

2014 Release

A document describing the original 2014 PatEx release can be cited as: Graham, Stuart J.H. and Marco, Alan C. and Miller, Richard, The USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset: A Window on the Process of Patent Examination (November 30, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2702637. Understanding how patent examination records become public is crucial to the proper analysis of the PatEx data. Thus, the document focuses primarily on the coverage of the underlying Public PAIR data and how it has evolved over time.

While the early documentation provides a good description of the coverage of the PatEx data, it does not describe the patent examination process in any great detail. An additional resource that provides more details on the examination process is the paper, "USPTO Patent Prosecution and Examiner Performance Appraisal", and can be cited as: Marco, Alan C., Toole, Andrew A., Miller, Richard and Frumkin, Jesse, USPTO Patent Prosecution and Examiner Performance Appraisal (June 1, 2017). USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2017-08. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2995674 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2995674

Finally, for those researchers who want to develop an even better understanding of the patent examination process and some of the statutes and regulations surrounding it, a good primer is the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure.

For questions, please email EconomicsData@uspto.gov.

Data files

Each of the files below can be downloaded in either Stata-14 (DTA) or CSV format.

Download a full set of data files (2014): [.dta format (5.42 GB)] [.csv format (4.33 GB)]

Download a full set of data files (2015): [.dta format (5.56 GB)] [.csv format (4.99 GB)]

Download a full set of data files (2016): [.dta format (4.98 GB)] [.csv format (4.36 GB)]

Download a full set of data files (2017): [.dta format (5.37 GB)][.csv format (4.8 GB)]

Download a full set of data files (2019):  [.dta format (9.4 GB)] [.csv format (7.87 GB)]

Download a full set of data files (2020):  [.dta format (11.8 GB)] [.csv format (8.63 GB)]

Download a full set of data files (2021):  [.dta format (12.5 GB)] [.csv format (9.83 GB)]

Download a full set of data files (2022):  [.dta format (17.6 GB)] [.csv format (12.1 GB)]

Download individual data files (the direct download pages are here: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022).