MODULE 1 · LESSON 3 / 4
Global patent data sources and their limits
7 min read · Patent Fundamentals
The patent data ecosystem
Not all patent data is created equal. The source you use directly impacts the quality of your analysis — and the Intelligence Grade™ that Stratensight calculates.
Understanding the strengths and limitations of each source is essential for interpreting any patent intelligence output correctly.
SOURCES — BY PRIORITY ORDER
Open sources vs premium sources
Open sources (EPO Open Patent Services, Google Patents Public Data) provide solid directional signals at no cost. Premium sources (Derwent Innovation, PatSnap, Questel) offer deeper coverage and higher-quality metadata.
OPEN SOURCES
- ›Free access to EP/US/PCT filings
- ›Good for directional signals
- ›Limited domestic CN/IN/TR coverage
- ›EPO cap: 2,000 patents per query
- ›Intelligence Grade™: typically MED
PREMIUM SOURCES
- ›Full global coverage including domestic filings
- ›Normalized assignee names
- ›Extended metadata (citations, legal status)
- ›No query caps
- ›Intelligence Grade™: typically HIGH
What we know about geographic coverage
No per-country completeness measurement is made — and nobody can make one. We do not know how many filings an office RECEIVED, only those it published and that the source returns. Calling a country “well covered” would compare a corpus against an unknown total.
What is measured is measured analysis by analysis: the publishing office is read from each publication number's prefix, and your analysis's source card lists the offices present with their document counts. That list describes YOUR corpus; it does not describe a source's coverage in general.
A dated comparison, in the absence of any completeness measurement: on 2026-08-21, over a shared window, a second source — now disconnected — held about 45% more Chinese publications. That is a gap between two sources, not a share of the total.
An office being present means documents come from it. It does not say what share of its filings was retrieved.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- ✓Derwent Innovation is the #1 recommended source (Tier 1 Pro, Intelligence Grade™ HIGH).
- ✓Open sources provide directional signals; premium sources enable strategic decisions.
- ✓No geographic coverage is measured: what is measured is the offices present in YOUR analysis.
QUIZ DE VALIDATION
1. Which patent data source is ranked as the #1 priority by Stratensight?
2. What can you actually say about an open source's geographic coverage?
3. An Intelligence Grade™ of 85 means the signal is:
4. When should you switch from open-source Explorer analysis to a premium data upload?
5. What determines the Intelligence Grade™ of an analysis?