II. Methodology Patent Landscape Report - Shale Oil and Gas

The search database used to obtain the dataset for this report is Thomson Innovation, by Clarivate Analytics, a provider of content-enabled workflow solutions.

Unless otherwise stated, all analysis presented in this report is undertaken on patent families. A patent family is one or more published patents with a shared priority. Analysis by patent family more accurately reflects the number of inventions present. This is because there is generally one invention per patent family, whereas analysis by raw number of patent publications inevitably involves double counting because one patent family may contain dozens of patent publications if the applicant files for the same invention in more than one country. Analysis by patent family gives more accurate results regarding the level of innovation taking place.

The search strategy used to generate the dataset for this analysis was based on a combination of predetermined International Patent Classification (IPC) codes, as well as specific keywords. Details regarding the IPC codes and keywords can be found in Annex B.

The Canadian subset of the data consists of a patent family where at least one application has an applicant with a Canadian address. The applicant data was cleansed to remove duplicate entries which relate to the same applicant, but where a different naming convention was used, due to spelling errors, international variations, etc.

Due to the size of the dataset, the emphasis was put on cleansing records relating to the top applicants. Some inconsistencies may still occur in the naming of applicants with smaller patent portfolios. For the reasons stated above, figures and tables presented in this report should be regarded as illustrative. More details regarding limitations in the data are provided in Annex C.