Abstract The present study is concerned with the emergence of Blockchain related technologies in terms of patenting activity. Blockchain has captured the attention of the public and research has intensified in this field over the last few years, making it a highly interesting topic of study for a patent analysis in order to obtain insight into the developments of this emerging technology. In this paper we present a unique methodology and exhaustive search strategy for identifying Blockchain patent documents by using a combination of specific keywords and patent classifications. This query was built in cooperation with subject matter experts of the European Patent Office (EPO). Our keyword set was then analysed by relevance and was prioritised. The set of specific relevant patent classifications was furthermore combined with keywords in order to exclude false positives. With our methodology we present an exhaustive query for retrieving a highly relevant dataset of Blockchain related patents, extracted from the EPO databases that can be used for patent landscaping exercises or any other bibliometric analysis. In a case study we applied the search strategy to analyse worldwide Blockchain patenting from 2008 till 2018. The results are presented in this paper.

中文翻译：

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区块链专利美化：基于专家的方法和搜索查询

摘要 本研究关注区块链相关技术在专利活动方面的出现。区块链引起了公众的注意，并且在过去几年中该领域的研究不断加强，使其成为专利分析的一个非常有趣的研究课题，以便深入了解这项新兴技术的发展。在本文中，我们提出了一种独特的方法和详尽的搜索策略，通过使用特定关键字和专利分类的组合来识别区块链专利文件。该查询是与欧洲专利局 (EPO) 的主题专家合作构建的。然后我们的关键字集通过相关性进行分析并确定优先级。一组特定的相关专利分类还与关键字相结合，以排除误报。通过我们的方法，我们提出了一个详尽的查询，用于检索高度相关的区块链相关专利数据集，这些数据集是从 EPO 数据库中提取的，可用于专利美化练习或任何其他文献计量分析。在一个案例研究中，我们应用了搜索策略来分析 2008 年至 2018 年的全球区块链专利申请。本文展示了结果。