#8/5/2020
Annual Reports Patent Data

This is the patent data used to match to the U.S. census in Sarada, Michael J. Andrews, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth (2019, Explorations in Economic History).

It includes two folders:

1) Raw
These are .txt files containing OCRed Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Patents and Annual Indices of Patents for the years 1870-1941, with one file per year (except for 1874, for which we could not locate an Annual Report).
PDFs of these Annual Reports and Indices are available from:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002138126
and
https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/annual-report-commissioner-patents-year

2) Parsed
These are .dta files with parsed patent and inventor information obtained from data in the "Raw" folder, with one file per year. The Raw .txt files are parsed using the code described in Sarada, Andrews, & Ziebarth (2019, Explorations in Economic History).

Each file contains the following variables:
-year: the year of the Annual Report
-lineno: the line number in the Annual Report from which a patent record is obtained
-inventor_id: the inventor number; the first inventor listed is recorded as "1", the second as "2", etc.
-last: inventor's last name
-first: inventor's first name
-town: inventor's town of residence
-state: inventor's state of residence
-invention_name: name or title of the patent
-assigned_flag: an indicator that equals one if an assignee is mentioned
-invention_type: the type of patent record (i.e., utility patent, design patent, plant patent, trademark, print, reissue patent, etc.)

Together, the variables "year", "lineno", and "inventor_id" uniquely identify each inventor on each patent record.

----------------------

For patents that have been matched to the U.S. census or for replication codes for Sarada, Andrews, & Ziebarth (2019, Explorations in Economic History), please see
American Inventors, 1870-1940
https://doi.org/10.3886/E109970V3

----------------------

For questions about the Annual Reports Patent Data, contact:
Mike Andrews
mandrews@nber.org