What does this analysis do?
The analysis counts the number of patents per applicant in your patent pool.
How does it work?
Applicant data are extracted from the bibliographic data. When multiple applicants are present, the list is split into individual items. An intelligent text comparison algorithm is used to merge applicants which are probably the same (i.e., in the case of spelling errors, abbreviations or company type suffixes).
How to operate the results?
The standard view for this analysis is a tagcloud, in which a larger font size correlates an applicant that has more patents. If you click on an applicant, the patent viewer will open, giving access to the patents underlying the word.
A second visualization is a table view, where you can quickly see the total list of players with the amount of patents linked to them.
What does it tell me?
The Applicant analysis shows the major applicants in for your topic of interest. If the patent pool is related to patents expressing a core technology, the resulting companies are the major technology providers or users for that technology.
By doing an overlay (via the Overlay analysis) with the Activity/Code analysis you’ll be able to quickly compare the activities of the companies, and see which players have emerging activities in your patent pool.