patentr (version 0.1.4)

get_bulk_patent_data: Get Bulk Patent Data from USPTO

Description

Download and convert bulk patent data to tidy format from the USPTO website <https://bulkdata.uspto.gov>. Data can be returned as a data frame or written to a file (see `output_file` parameter). Since USPTO issues patents weekly, at minimum, all patents from a given week must be acquired at once.

Usage

get_bulk_patent_data(year, week, output_file)

Arguments

year

integer vector containing years from which patents should be collected

week

integer vector of weeks within the corresponding `year` element from which patents should be collected

output_file

variable of class `character`; will output to that file in CSV format

Value

either `TRUE` (placeholder) or object of class `data.frame` (see param `output_file` for details)

Examples

# NOT RUN {
## NOTE: none of the examples are run due to the download requirement
# }
# NOT RUN {
# download patents from the first week of 1976 and get data frame
patent_data <- get_bulk_patent_data(year = 1976, week = 1)

# download patents from the last 5 weeks of 1980 (and write to a file)
get_bulk_patent_data(year = rep(1980, 5), week = 48:52,
                     output_file = "patent-data.csv")
# }