Exploring technology in the biofuels sector through patent data: the BioPat database

This paper describes the methodology, characteristics and potential use of BioPat, a dataset containing patents in the field of biofuels. The innovative methodology we use aims to solve drawbacks related to how patent data are allocated and organized in international databases. In order to create a database which includes patents strictly related to the investigated field, we propose an original method based on keywords, rather than on International Patent Classification (IPC) codes. Starting with a systematic mapping of biofuel production processes, we built a simplified but comprehensive description of the technological domain related to the production of biofuels by applying so-called process analysis. The keyword selection relies on an iterative approach, based on an analysis of recent scientific literature. The database was finalized with a series of interviews with experts in the biofuels sector, and compared with IPC-based biofuel codes, revealing improved accuracy when selecting data using our methodology.