Qscore is the most advanced tool available for ranking the potential commercial value of a patent or a portfolio of patents. Other ranking methods typically rely heavily on a patent's reference graph (citations to/from other patents). Qscore is far more sophisticated: using data mining tokenization techniques, Qscore takes into account multiple factors correlated with patent value. This document generally describes the method used to assign a quality score to each patent, which is used to bias the ranking of the results returned from the keyword-based searching in the analytics embodiment of the present invention. This quality score, denoted by Qscore, is designed to identify the patents that are not only relevant to the user's query but also possess some additional, query independent, quality characteristics. Consequently, Qscore can be considered as an information filtering aid—designed to identify the “good” information from a “sea” of information.