Comprehensive Patent Data of the German Democratic Republic 1949-1990

We document the generation and the content of the Comprehensive Patent Database (CPDB) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1990), which is freely available at GESIS https://doi.org/10.7802/2448. The database contains all patents granted in the GDR and published by the Office of Inventions and Patents (later: German Patent and Trade Mark Office/DPMA). The core database covers the years 1950-1990 and contains 24 variables with manually cleaned and processed information on a total of 261,822 unique patents of the GDR.