10 most common pitfalls of patent research > 9. Your analysis of patent filings by company, inventor or agent is incomplete
Consider that 45% of all global patent applications in 2020 originate from Mainland China. Millions of patents are drafted in Chinese, and translated to Japanese, Korean, Russian or German, and then translated back to English. During this process, company and inventor names are transliterated one or more times, names are inverted and alternate spellings introduced.
As a result, it’s become much more difficult to know if the patent data you’re using to answer important questions like “what inventors have filed the most patents in lithium ion technology globally” or “in what markets is my competitor filing patents related to data centers” is complete.
Find out how your patent data provider handles company, inventor and agent names originating from jurisdictions that use non-Latin characters (such as South Korea, Russia or Thailand.)
Clarivate uses a combination of machine learning and human translation to translate and normalize inventor, company and agent names originating in 30 different languages. Inventor, assignee and agent names originating from South Korea, Mainland China and Japan are standardized using AI-assisted human curation to ensure consistency across all global publications.