The size of patent applications has doubled over the past two decades, resulting in a dramatic surge in the workload of patent offices all over the world and serious concerns over patent quality standards. The current paper investigates the sources of this inflation in claims and pages for EPO...

This paper describes a new patent-based indicator of inventive activity. The indicator is based on counting all the priority patent applications filed by a country's inventors, regardless of the patent office in which the application is filed, and can therefore be considered as a complete...