USPTO Patent Data – Overview (≈175 words) The USPTO Patent Data suite is a family of openly‑available research datasets produced by the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Office of the Chief Economist (OCE). It aggregates all bibliographic, legal‑status, assignment, and examination records for U.S. utility patents (and related applications) spanning more than five decades—roughly 1970 through the present. The core files include: * PatentsView – a flexible API‑driven catalogue that lets users query, filter and bulk‑download 40 years of grant, citation, examiner, inventor, assignee, and classification information. * Patent Assignment Dataset – ~6 million transaction records (1970‑2014) linking patents to owners, useful for studying technology ownership and collateralisation. * Historical Patent Data Files – NBER‑classified micro‑level data on applications, grants and in‑force patents, enabling sector‑level innovation analysis. * Office‑Action (PatEx) and Examination Datasets – detailed examiner‑applicant interaction logs for research on the patent prosecution process. The overarching purpose is to enable economists, scholars, and policy analysts to investigate the economics of invention, diffusion, and IP markets. Typical use cases include measuring R&D productivity, mapping technology spillovers, evaluating patent‑policy reforms, and building machine‑learning models of novelty or litigation risk. Unique aspects are the breadth of coverage (full U.S. patent universe), the integration of NBER technology classifications, and an openly‑documented API that supports both ad‑hoc queries and massive bulk extracts.