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Daniel Marques Golodne and Alexandre Sousa da Silva, “Managing patent examiners’ workload by using patent application volume data,” World Patent Information, 03-xx-2022, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0172219022000023#!

Since the early 1980's, the amount of patent applications filed in several jurisdictions has been steadily and drastically increasing, resulting in a marked increase in the number of unexamined applications (the so-called backlog) in every patent office [1]. The workload in each office might be considered one of the key indicators affecting the overall quality of patent systems [2].

In a study on patent applications filed at the European Patent Office (EPO) Archontopoulos et al. [3] have unequivocally demonstrated that, besides the marked increase in the amount of applications, the volume of each application has also increased in recent years, particularly concerning the number of pages and number of claims. The total page count of a patent document can be associated with the degree of disclosure supplied, while the total number of claims might indicate the scope or width of protection which is sought. In this study the authors point out some limitations that might be taken into account when using these parameters in any analysis: (i) total page estimates are dependent on the formatting of the documents, with a great deal of variation among applications and different patent offices; (ii) ideally one should separately analyse the number of independent and dependent claims, although this sort of information is currently not easily recovered from the available data sources; and (iii) both variables are strongly linked to the language employed, e.g. more words are found in documents in Latin languages compared to Germanic languages – the latter having longer words [3]. Even having those limitations in mind, the authors indicate that the number of pages and claims is correlated – positively, albeit in different proportion – with the number of priorities, inventors and IPC symbols assigned; and also influenced by the country of origin and technological field – with a greater volume associated with applications having US origin and from sectors like biotechnology and computers.

Hence, patent offices have to deal with the combined effects of the increase both in the number of applications and volume per application, which tends to deepen the backlog issues that they have to face [3,4].

The increasing volume of patent applications is frequently associated with a corresponding increase in complexity, following the assumption that as a technology becomes more complex, more words are needed to describe it properly. The complexity of the analysis of a patent application might be tentatively correlated with several indicators derived from the document itself [3,5]. One should bear in mind that measuring complexity is thought to be dependent on the context, and behaviour/capabilities of the observer [6]. For instance, Broekel [7] quantified the complexity of technologies based on the co-occurrence of classification symbols (CPC) in a dataset of European patent applications spanning a period of 36 years, demonstrating that complexity is increasing over time. Clearly, the increasing volume of each patent application is linked with an in increase in the pendency time until granting [3].

Some authors indicate that from the standpoint of the patent examiners, this increasing workload – together with the inherent pressures to reduce time taken in the analysis of each application – might affect the quality of patents that are being granted (by increasing the grant of “weak” or “doubtful” patents, given the tendency, e.g., to overlook relevant documents in the state of the art due to the time constraints) [8,9].

Worldwide patent applications per year are rising steadily at a ∼6% rate (with the notable exception of 2009, with a decrease of ∼4% due to financial crisis), and have reached 3.3 million in 2018; in Brazil, the number of pending applications has dropped slightly, but still amounts to ∼200k applications [9]. As of 2018, the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial – INPI-BR) employed 323 patent examiners, with an average experience of 12.6 years, and which were responsible for almost 10k granted patents (a marked ∼80% increase from 2017) [10].