Measuring patent quality: A claim and search report approach

This paper presents a new prospective metric for assessing the novelty and inventiveness of patents. It does this by using initial patent search reports and examiner's intuition about the impact of adverse citations on patent claim survival. The paper then demonstrates the metric by evaluating the quality of Switzerland's national patent stock using a selection model, finding that between 84 and 90% of the country's national patents would likely not survive examination at the European Patent Office. In doing so, it contributes to the larger literature on patent assessment, underscores the relevance of patent strategy in the observed characteristics of patents, and removes some of the ambiguity in the academic literature about backward citations.