The artificial patents in the PATSTAT database: How much do they matter when computing indicators of internationalisation based on worldwide priority patents?

This paper proposes to broaden by more than 10%—compared with the current practice—the set of applications for priority patents, which is used to compute worldwide patent indicators. This extension is made possible thanks to the inclusion in the corpus of documents used for the calculation of indicators of the first filing patent applications that are designated as “artificial priority patents” in the PATSTAT database and currently discarded for the production of indicators. This research aims to show how adding these “artificial” patent applications can modify the value of the worldwide patent indicators. Artificial patent applications have never been used before because they contain very scarce information in their original state. We present a methodology we have developed to, first, replenish the artificial patents with information retrieved from close patents belonging to the same INPADOC family. Then, we study in details a range of indicators characterising the trends in the internationalisation of corporate R&D inventive activities. We provide evidence that the internationalisation pattern can be modified when including replenished artificial corporate patents in the indicator calculation. At the world level, incorporating artificial priority patents does not affect the trends over time, nor introduce any significant changes in the values of the indicators. However, analyses performed at a smaller scale, such as the firms’ continent level or the firms’ sector, show significant changes of the level of the intercontinental internationalisation in particular for the US firms.