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This work concerns a fully functional and deployed framework for patent analysis. The potential applications of this work range from the exploratory analysis and scoping of patent technologies and themes to the discovery of key companies that invest in specific patent domains. In our study, we present an exploration of patents related to human and project management and demonstrate how the developed tool enables the rapid interpretation of the findings.

Patent analysis is a field that concerns the analysis of patent records, for the purpose of extracting insights and trends, and it is widely used in various fields. Despite the abundance of proprietary software employed for this purpose, there is currently a lack of easy-to-use and publicly available software that can offer simple and intuitive visualizations, while advocating for open science and scientific software development. In this study, we attempt to fill this gap by offering PatentInspector, an open-source, public tool that, by leveraging patent data from the United States Trademark and Patent Office, is able to produce descriptive analytics, thematic axes and citation network analysis. The use and interpretability of PatentInspector is illustrated through a use case on human resource management-related patents, highlighting its functionalities. The results indicate that PatentInspector is a practical resource for conducting patent analytics and can be used by individuals with a limited or no background in coding and software development.