Office Action Research Dataset for Patents

Update

The Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) is no longer updating the Office Action Research Dataset, but the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has created Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to access newer data (all office actions mailed since October 2017 to 30 days prior to the current date).

• Office Action Rejection API 
• Office Action Citations API 

Office Action Research Dataset for Patents

The Office Action Research Dataset for Patents contains detailed information derived from office actions issued by patent examiners to applicants during the patent examination process. The “office action” is a written notification to the applicant of the examiner’s decision on patentability and generally discloses the grounds for a rejection, the claims affected, and the pertinent prior art. This initial release consists of three files derived from 4.4 million office actions mailed during the 2008 to mid-2017 period from USPTO examiners to the applicants of 2.2 million unique patent applications.

A working paper describing this dataset is available and can be cited as: Lu, Qiang and Myers, Amanda F. and Beliveau, Scott, USPTO Patent Prosecution Research Data: Unlocking Office Action Traits (November 20, 2017). USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2017-10. 

This effort is made possible by the USPTO Digital Services & Big Data portfolio and collaboration with the USPTO OCE.

For questions, please email EconomicsData@uspto.gov.

Documentation

• Data schema
• Variable tables

Data Files

Download full set of 2017 data files [.dta format (1.31 GB)] [.csv format (800 MB)]

Download individual data files:

 The direct download page can be viewed here.