Hopefully this makes sense. What we have collected already are the 'focal patents'. We need the IDs of the patents that our focal patents cite. We also need the IDs of the patents which cite our focal patents and their references.

To be consistent with OpenAlex:

1. Back citations: Collect citation data for the focal patents and save as a json like

{
    focal_patent_id_0: [cited_patent_id_0, cited_patent_id_1, ...],
    focal_patent_id_0: [cited_patent_id_1, cited_patent_id_6, ...],
}

2. Forward citations: For all of the focal patents, find the patents that cite them. For each of these patents, collect their citation data in the same format above. Save separately as forward citations. This might yield a lot of patents. For OpenAlex I had to save the outputs by year.

notes from chat w/ george to threshold citations:

Threshold:

• Types of citations (based on the data dictionary)
• minimum # of citations per paper
• what about just doing a couple of years? Latest date is 2017 - DON’T COLLECT 2018 - 2022
• what about collecting for two years - 2007 AND 2017