While a lot of focus among patent database is being given to newer analytic techniques, legal status analysis and newer types of visualizations, not much of innovation has happened in how a database chooses which record to display from the result set, a step that is critical for many types of patent projects except perhaps patentability. Most databases force a user to view a record from preset country priority order and the users thereby are left to either investigate each family member or export the data to extract meaningful statistics.
All currently available databases can be categorized into the following two types: (Simple/Extended) Family based databases or Publication based databases.
Family based databases enforce results to be unique families each of which can be of one type mostly – Simple Family, Extended (INPADOC) Family or a variation of INPADOC wherein custom rules are applied to break large families into smaller sets. The result you see is usually a US, EP or WO record if present. It isn’t possible to view the results by a particular country of choice. Recent articles