Intellectual Property Data Library

Free Patent & Innovation Data for Research

Research-grade innovation measures computed from the complete US patent record — citations, originality & generality, firm patent panels — free, citable, reproducible, and honest about methodology. US patent data is public domain.

9,454,161US Patents

152,631,929Citation Links

540,995Patent Holders

1976–2025Years Covered

Counts measured on the library's data store at generation — never estimated. Vintage: PatentsView 2026-07-15 release (USPTO Open Data Portal), coverage 1976-01-06 to 2025-12-30.

What the library holds

Built from USPTO / PatentsView bulk data (US-government public domain), refreshed each PatentsView release.

Built & validated

Innovation measures

Per-patent and per-firm measures on all 9,454,161 granted patents (details below) — the dataset is computed, verified, and staged for launch.

Built & validated

Firm patent panels

1,485,924 assignee×year observations across 540,995 disambiguated patent holders: patent counts, citation-weighted output, mean originality/generality.

Arriving — downloads in progress

Full patent text

Claims, descriptions and abstracts for every patent since 1976 and every published application since 2001 — the substrate for claim-scope and text-similarity measures.

Arriving — downloads in progress

Ownership, value & disputes

Patent assignments (sales, mergers, collateral pledges), maintenance-fee renewals (the classic revealed-value signal), and litigation dockets.

Arriving — downloads in progress

Trademarks back to 1884

The second IP pillar: every US trademark application and registration — marks, owners, classes, assignments, and TTAB disputes.

Planned

API, downloads & AI access

The family pattern: free API key, citation-headed downloads, snapshot-pinned bundles, and MCP tools so AI assistants can query the library directly. One free ElkassabgiData account works across every library.

The measures

Standard, literature-grounded, and computed transparently — every value traces to the formula and the vintage.

Impact

Forward citations (total + fixed 5- and 10-year windows)
Backward citations, incl. self-citation counts by shared assignee
Truncation flags on recent grant years — right-censoring is disclosed, never hidden

Breadth

Originality & Generality (Hall–Jaffe–Trajtenberg)
Reported raw and bias-corrected (Hall 2005); undefined values are null, never zero
CPC-subclass technology fields (WIPO sectors included)

Patent & firm attributes

Claims count, application→grant lag, inventor team size
Government-interest (federally funded) flag
Disambiguated assignee panels by grant year

Methodology, honestly

Every measure follows the canonical literature — Hall, Jaffe & Trajtenberg (2001), Hall (2005) — and the full formulas ship with the data. Two disclosures researchers should know before comparing numbers across papers:

Technology classes. Originality and generality are computed over CPC subclasses (~679 classes), each patent assigned its primary class. The original NBER variables used ~400 USPC main classes; finer classes mechanically raise the scores, so levels are not directly comparable to the 2001 NBER files.

Truncation. Forward-citation counts are right-censored for recent patents. Fixed-window counts (5y/10y) carry explicit truncation flags whenever the window extends past the data's last grant date, and windows are measured from the citing patent's grant date — not the citation record's date field, which carries the cited patent's date.

Citation, always: United States Patent and Trademark Office — PatentsView (public domain); measures computed by the IP Data Library. Producer first, library second — the family standard.