How assignee groups facilitate patent research
Use the Assignee patent field to focus your patent research and analysis results. The Assignee field contains the name of the company or individual to whom ownership of the patent was assigned at the time of publication.
It is often helpful to define an assignee group that combines related patent assignees. When you submit queries, you can specify the name of a single assignee group instead of the names of numerous individual assignees in that group. In this way, specifying assignees by means of assignee group names can improve your efficiency and increase the accuracy of your results.
Here are some examples of why you might want to combine assignees into assignee groups:
- Mergers and acquisitions between companies.
- Several divisions or groups in a large company. You create an assignee group to combine the various company divisions or groups under a single name.
- Abbreviating company names. The full company name might be abbreviated in some patents but not in others. You create an assignee group to combine both the full name and the abbreviated names of a specific assignee.
- Spelling variations and misspellings. The name of the same person or company might not be spelled consistently from patent to patent. In some cases, names of international companies might contain non-English characters. You create an assignee group to combine all the spelling variants of an assignee name.