Filing activity in this dataset ran at 62 records in 2017, its peak year, then fell toward a midpoint of 8 by 2022 with no clear recovery since. That pattern typically shows up when the most accessible composition space has already been claimed and later entrants face crowded prior art, particularly the beryllium-bearing and quinary alloy patents that still dominate the citation rankings. It is worth noting that publication lags actual filing by around eighteen months, so the final year or two of any trend chart will always look artificially low and should not be read as a sudden stop.

The most-cited records in this corpus are beryllium-bearing amorphous alloy patents from the mid-1990s, led by one patent describing beryllium-bearing amorphous metallic alloys formed by low cooling rates at 760 citations, alongside a quinary metallic glass alloy patent and a related beryllium-bearing forming-method patent. Their citation counts, in the hundreds, mean most subsequent composition filings in this space have had to distinguish themselves from this specific group. A newer entrant, a machine-learning-based alloy design patent, also appears among the most-cited, signalling that computational composition search is becoming a recognised prior-art category in its own right.

The recent-year momentum data in this corpus shows every tracked assignee, including institutional and corporate names as well as individual inventors, at zero filings in the latest tracked year, reflecting the broader multi-year decline in filing activity. Historically, the strongest filing relationships are between a small cluster of individual co-inventors, with the top pair sharing 91 families and two other pairings each near 70. That concentration suggests activity in this field has been driven by a tightly linked filing programme rather than a wide field of independent competitors.

The IPC distribution shows C22C alloy claims accounting for 732 of the 1,118 records in this corpus, more than five times the next largest class, while application-specific classes tied to batteries and data storage sit at 50 and 49 records respectively. Given how often metallic glass is proposed as a candidate material for battery electrodes and magnetic components, that gap looks structural rather than incidental. Corrosion-resistant iron-based coatings for thermal spray applications and machine-learning-guided composition search also show comparatively thin claim density relative to their technical relevance.

The United States receives 548 of the filings tracked in this corpus, more than double the next largest office, the European Patent Office at 143, with WIPO PCT applications close behind at 124. Japan, China and Germany each receive a smaller share. This distribution suggests that commercially significant metallic glass composition filings have historically prioritised US protection first, with PCT filings used to preserve broader international options before committing to national phase entry.