Saturday 21 April 2012

Some Stats


We have not had any new decisions on the DG3 webpage for more than one month. If Laurent had not found the recent “test case” decisions, this blog would already have shut down by now. There is only one who creates ex nihilo, and I am not Him.

So I will content myself with giving you feed-back on the recent polls on who the readers of this blog are.

The first poll concerned the professional context of my readers.

292 readers participated in the poll. Here is the outcome, sorted in decreasing order.


and a (condensed) pie chart:


What I find interesting is that private practice is much stronger than industry. Of course, one has to take into account that there are more EP attorneys working in private practice than in industry. I have not been able to find precise figures, but I have heard that in the epi, there are twice as much private practice attorneys than industry attorneys. If this is true, industry is still under-represented.

I am happy and honoured to see that EPO employees are interested in this blog, too. I knew that two or three Board members were regular visitors, but that there were not less than 16 members of the Boards is a pleasant surprise.

Even more surprisingly, there are a few foreign attorneys among the readers of this blog.

***

The second poll concerned the “technical field of predilection” of my readers.

256 readers participated in the poll.

Obviously, it was possible to give more than one answer, and most people did: on average, there were 1.9 fields cited per participant.

Here is the outcome:


The poll confirmed my impression that the biotech community was quite well represented. But the biggest surprise to me was the great number of chemists among the readers of this blog. The other fields are more or less evenly distributed.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is pitty that among 4000 EPO examiners, less than 1% admits reading the blog.

With your distinction of EPO examiners with or without EQE you necessarily excluded some senior examiners who started early. Isn't the man in question under D1/80 now among the EPO stuff?

ANON

Anonymous said...

I don't know how many professional representatives there are. I guess about 9000? In that case the number of attorneys reading this blog (133) out of all attorneys represents about 1,5% of all attorneys.

Not much worse when compared to Examiners.

Oliver said...

There are now more than 10000 registered EP attorneys.

I think it is not useful to consider the absolute figures because nobody knows how many of the readers were willing to take part in a poll. Also, people reading the posts via a thread or via e-mail or on smart-phones could have missed that there were polls.

I for one am quite amazed to see how many people are actually interested in such a niche blog.