DOCUMENTATION FOR THE "PCT_15.TXT" PATENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA EXTRACT FILE ------------------------------------------------------------------------- PCT_DOC_15.TXT 7/7/2016 6:11PM Questions about the custom patent data extract files should be directed to: US Patent and Trademark Office Electronic Information Products Division Patent Technology Monitoring Team P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, VA 22313-1450 tel : (571) 272-5600 e-mail : oeip@uspto.gov Patent Bibliographic Information - PCT Data ------------------------------------------- Notes ----- This custom extract data file includes Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) information relating to utility and reissue patents and statutory invention registrations issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The PCT-related information contained in this custom data extract file is limited to the data included in the PCT-specific bibliographic section of the issued USPTO documents and does not include PCT-related information that may appear in other bibliographic sections of the patent documents. PCT-related information (from the PCT-specific bibliographic section) is included for: utility patents issued from 1/1/1975 to 12/31/2015 and for reissue patents and statutory invention registrations issued from 1/1/1977 to 12/31/2015. PCT data correspond to patents issued beginning April 1, 1980 that are based on applications filed by way of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) . Based on a scan of the file contents, PCT data seem to appear consistently on a weekly basis for U.S. patent grants beginning in 1983 with a limited amount of PCT data appearing prior to 1983. 474,296 records, CY 2015 File size: 44,726,377 bytes (about 45 MB) File name: PCT_15.TXT - The file format is as follows: - Columns 1-7 : Citing patent NUMBER (i.e., issued patent that contains the references to related PCT filings) (character field) - Columns 9-26 : Related PCT application number (character field) - Columns 28-37 : Related PCT 35 U.S.C. 371 date (character field) - Columns 39-48 : Related PCT 35 U.S.C. 102(e) date (character field) - Columns 50-59 : Related PCT filing date (character field) - Columns 61-75 : Related PCT publication number (character field) - Columns 77-86 : Related PCT publication date (character field) - Columns 88-91 : State-country code of the filed PCT document (this field does not appear to be particularly useful at this time) (character field) - Columns 92-94 : State-country code of the published PCT document (this field does not appear to be particularly useful at this time) (character field) - Columns 96-103 : PCT filed type (available for patents issued on or after 2015-01-01; this field is a descriptor that corresponds to the "Related PCT 35 U.S.C. 371 date" field in columns 28-37 that is described above; see the USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, Chapter 1800, Section 1893, and particularly Section 1893.01, for further discussion of the field descriptor values and their meanings) Each line is terminated with a carriage return and a line feed character (0D 0A in hexadecimal) after the last populated data field. Trailing blank spaces in each record may be removed to reduce the size of the file. - Dates are presented in "YYYY-MM-DD" format where YYYY is the four digit year, MM is the two digit month, and DD is the two digit day. - A list of the patent numbers that do not correspond to actual patents is supplied in the file, "WITHDRAWN_75_15_PN.TXT". Since these "withdrawn" patent numbers do not correspond to valid documents, they are excluded, as citing patents, from the data file. - A file "LASTPN_15.TXT" has been provided that displays the last patent number by year and patent document type. - Citing patents that are missing from the data file are listed in a separate file, "MISSING_15.TXT". In general, patent documents are missing from this data file because the corresponding data were omitted from the original electronic text files produced for the patents issued each week. Most of the citing patents missing from the data extract file are utility patents granted in 1975. - A file, "ST_CNTRY_15.TXT" contains state-country codes and corresponding U.S. state and country names for geographic data fields appearing in this data extract. THE USER SHOULD NOTE THAT SOME STATE-COUNTRY CODES IN THE CUSTOM DATA EXTRACT MAY NOT HAVE CORRESPONDING ENTRIES IN THE "ST_CNTRY_15.TXT" FILE. - Generally, the format of the cited PCT document numbers has not been standardized. As a result, the format of the identified PCT document numbers may vary from record to record. - ** NOTE ** Although efforts have been made to remove duplicate PCT document entries, some duplicate entries may remain. - The data are sorted by ascending citing patent document number and pct number. - Small samples of the data contained in the PCT data file are included in two separate files, "SAMPLE_PCT_15A.TXT" and "SAMPLE_PCT_15B.TXT". There is a change in the fields captured for this custom extract beginning with patents granted in 2005, as can be viewed in the "SAMPLE_PCT_15A.TXT" sample file. - The last field "PCT filed type" is new for 2015 and is populated beginning with patents issued on or after January 6, 2015 (beginning with utility patent number 8925112 and reissue patent number RE45324).