What does this analysis do?
The analysis counts the number of patents per company (= applicant without inventors) 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).
Inventors in the applicant field (especially in US patents) are filtered so you only see the companies.
How to operate the results?
The standard view for this analysis is a tagcloud, in which a larger font size correlates a company that has more patents. If you click on an company, 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 companies with the amount of patents linked to them.
What does it tell me?
The Company analysis shows the major companies 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.