Methodology & sources
How this corpus was built — and what we refuse to claim
A tribute is worthless if it can't be trusted. Every fact on this site traces to a source, and every statement carries a tier.
The three tiers
| T1 · from the patent | Numbers, dates, inventors, claims, abstracts, figures — read from the patent documents themselves (USPTO publications, public domain), as indexed by Justia and Google Patents. |
| T2 · external source | Historical and clinical context, cited inline with URL and access date — peer-reviewed where possible (e.g. the rate-responsive pacing literature, hydrocephalus shunt outcome studies, nuclear pacemaker history). |
| T3 · interpretation | Our synthesis: cluster theses, narrative framing, inferences about significance — always labeled, with a stated confidence, and never silently mixed with the tiers above. |
Corpus assembly & disambiguation
The corpus was assembled from the Justia inventor index (7 pages), then cross-checked patent-by-patent against Google Patents. "David A. Ruben" collides with at least one other inventor of the same name — a consumer- products designer. The rule: include only records with a Medtronic assignee, or a strong co-inventor-network match to confirmed Medtronic records. 4 records were excluded under this rule (a hair-dryer assembly, an appliance-interface design patent assigned to American Design Group, and two unassigned consumer design patents). One additional grant (US9865533) was discovered via a cross-reference in US10535596 and added. Application publications are collapsed into their granted patents — nothing is double-counted.
How the ranking works
Patents are tiered — flagship, major, notable, supporting — from transparent signals, not an opaque score: verified forward-citation counts (fetched for a subset so far; null means not-yet-fetched, never zero), continuation-family size, sole/first-listed inventorship, line-founding status, and external co-assignment (Corning). Product and clinical impact are kept as narrative (T2/T3) and never silently folded into tiers. Full-corpus citation data is the next enrichment pass; tiers may shift when it lands.
What we deliberately do not claim
- That any specific patent is practiced in any named shipped product — unless a public source says so, which so far none does.
- Clinical outcomes beyond what cited literature supports.
- Citation counts we haven't fetched.
Primary sources
- Justia — David A. Ruben inventor index
- Google Patents — full documents, claims, figures, citations
- External sources cited inline in each deep dive, with access dates
Corpus assembled 2026-07-21/22 · data at data/corpus.json in the
project repository · corrections welcome — that's what the tiers are for.