Patents are the exclusive rights to the inventors for protecting their inventions. Patent claim breadth plays a crucial role in the technological advancement. Patents have broad claims and narrow claims, broad claims covering general concepts while narrow claim focus on specific detailed applications. Patent claim breadth is an important element in patent analysis, as it correlates to various aspects of innovation incentives, intellectual property strategies, and technological progress. Tracking how claim breadth changes over time helps the researchers to understand the trends in innovation and intellectual property.

Citation analytics helps to determine the evolution of patent claim breadth over time. An analysis of citations in patent relationships may provide understanding the claim breadth across industries, time periods, and technologies. 

How citation analytics helps to track claim breadth over time?

A patent may include both forward and backward citations. Analyzing patent citations helps to understand how broad or narrow claims of a patent.

1. Analyze forward & backward citations

A patent followed by large number of forward citations often covers a broad foundational idea for a large number of subsequent innovations, which reflects broad claim breadth.

Similarly, a patent with fewer backward citations is likely to be more novel and therefore less constrained by existing knowledge, giving way to broader potential for claim.

2. Historical trends

Citation helps to understanding the evolution of an industry and predicting future trends.

3. Technology Trends

Evaluating the patent citations provides a quick idea of the current state of development of a technology or industry.

4. Diversity of citation sources

A patent is likely to represent a broad and foundational idea if the citations come from various areas of technology or industries.

Advantages

• Helps the inventors to draft stronger patents
• The researchers will gain insights into innovation dynamics and helps to predict the future trends
• Time-Efficient Analysis
• Longitudinal Trends
• Cost effective
• Free databases available

Databases used for Citation analysis: Orbit, Espacenet, Google patents, Patseer, WIPO

Conclusions

Breadth of a claim defines the historical trends of a patent which helps how much a patent claim can prevent others from doing the same thing. It is a critical step for innovation and filing patents. Citation analytics is one of the most effective tools for tracking breadth of claim. Citation analytics provides a structure of a claim like how it evolves over time, and providing insights for inventors and researchers. Tracking how claim breadth changes over time helps us understand trends in innovation and intellectual property.