Binette's 2022 Inventors Benchmark

Hand-disambiguation of a sample of U.S. patents inventor mentions from PatentsView.org.

Inventors we selected indirectly by sampling inventor mentions uniformly at random. This results in inventor sampled with probability proportional to their number of granted patents.

The time period considered is from 1976 to December 31, 2021, corresponding to the disambiguation labeled "disamb_inventor_id_20211230" in PatentsView's bulk data downloads "g_persistent_inventor.tsv" file (https://patentsview.org/download/data-download-tables). That is, the benchmark disambiguation intends to contain all inventor mentions for the sampled inventors from that time period. Note that the benchmark disambiguation contains a few extraneous mentions to patents granted outside of that time period. These should be ignored for evaluation purposes.

The methodology used for the hand-disambiguation is described in Binette et al. (2022) (https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01230). We used one disambiguation of 200 inventors from Binette et al. (2022), as well as an additional disambiguation of 200 inventors provided by an additional staff member. The two disambiguations were reviewed and validated. However, they should be expected to contain errors due to the ambiguous nature of inventor disambiguation. Furthermore, given the use as the December 30, 2021, disambiguation from PatentsView as a starting point of the hand-labeling, a bias towards this disambiguation should be expected.