Graph that downloads patent citation data from USPTO's PatentsView API on-demand and stores it locally in an SQL database (and in memory) for fast access later.

The project is based on the graphscraper project, please see that project for the details of the graph API.

Install the latest version of the project from the Python Package Index using pip install uspto-patent-citation-graph.

Creating a graph instance that will use a default, on-disk SQLite database:

from uspto_patent_citation_graph import USPTOPatentCitationGraph

graph = USPTOPatentCitationGraph(None)

Loading a node that is not in the local database yet:

# `can_validate_and_load=True` tells the graph's node list that it is allowed to
# load data from the PatentsView API. Its default value is `False`, and the
# argument can be omitted if the given patent is already in the local database.
patent_number = "4733665"  # Stent patent
stent_patent = graph.nodes.get_node_by_name(patent_number, can_validate_and_load=True)

Accessing a node's neighbors (cited and cited-by patents):

print(f"Neighbors of {stent_patent.name}:")
for neighbor in stent_patent.neighbors:
    print(f" - {neighbor.name}: {neighbor.external_id}")

You can find related projects here:

• graphscraper
• localclustering

Any form of constructive contribution is welcome:

• Questions, feedback, bug reports: please open an issue in the issue tracker of the project or contact the repository owner by email, whichever you feel appropriate.
• Contribution to the software: please open an issue in the issue tracker of the project that describes the changes you would like to make to the software and open a pull request with the changes. The description of the pull request must references the corresponding issue.

The following types of contribution are especially appreciated:

The library is open-sourced under the conditions of the MIT license.