Digest I - April 2016

Each month I will be publishing a summary of what’s new in the world of commercial information and search, with a particular focus on all things to do with patent information, search, analysis, software and services.

This is the first monthly digest, bringing together in one place the latest trends in the industry, based on tracking of the major players providing patent information software and services, the major national patent offices, and those providing commercial information and search technologies. Digests will contain sections on content, search technology, post search results review, uses of patent information, and IP service provider updates.

Content enhancements and new content for commercial search

Chemical information and regulatory understanding. CAS / STN’s ChemList now contains details of the 79 substances from the State of Vermont List of Chemicals of High Concern to Children.

The volume of patent applications filed each year has reached over 2.7 million, and they are in a multitude of languages.   We rely increasingly on full-text machine translated patent collections to search these documents in a form of English.

STN is bringing improvements to two collections - French patents and Chinese patents. The Chinese (CNFULL) produced by Questel is now created using improved machine translation software. The new software has been in use since 29th June 2015 update, the complete collection back to 1985 will now be re-translated. LexisNexis Univentio, the producer of the FRFULL database on STN is making a different improvement – rescanning French full text documents using enhanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology improves the quality in the original language and when the documents are machine translated into English. FRFULL contains patents from 1855 onwards.

Academic literature: ProQuest launched nine regional databases containing material published by academic organizations, societies, educational institutions, and academic presses. Collectively the databases cover publications from over 110 countries, 350 university presses and 150 academic associations and societies. The content is multi-disciplinary covering business, humanities, medical, science, technology, engineering, and social sciences.  

Popular titles: EBSCO added five well known magazines - Fortune, Life, People, Sports Illustrated and Time Magazine Archives. These journals as well as being of interest to those studying recent history, politics and culture, business, advertising, sports and leisure, this type of resource may also be useful for invalidity searches to show when products were marketed, as well as prior art. Importantly adverts are also included and indexed in the collection.

Search technology

Ambercite has released an improvement to its ‘Cluster Searching’ tool which filters citations as ‘known’ (patent examiner citations) and 'unknown' (patent examiner citations). This makes it easier to identify prior art, for say, an opposition proceeding. Tracking patent citations just got easier for Minesoft customers. ‘CiteTracker’ has been improved and now provides features for filtering citations according to backward/forward citations, by jurisdiction, examiner category code and assignee. Self-citations can be removed. Analytics functionality has also been added, as has a link to Citation Explorer.  

Post search review

Deep reading of chemical information found in full text patents with ‘PatentPak’ in STN. PatentPak allows you to find the specific location of chemicals mentioned in patents with interactive links to key substances. PatentPak provides access to more than 9 million patents from 31 patent offices, including:   China, European Patent Office, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, United States, World Intellectual Property Organization. Case law post-search visualisation of hits using ‘Search Term Maps’ from Lexis Nexis also aimed at improving post-search review of documents in the Lexis Advance case law collection. The tool uses colour coding and a location indicator to provide a visual overview of where search words have been found. Groupings of terms, and a review of hits in context to judge relevance.

Patent information usage and IP Service Providers

AWA Patent is now a sponsor at the Uppsala Innovation Centre (UIC), one of Sweden's highly regarded business incubators which has university connections.

On global IP day (April 26th) CPA Global announced new branding for its acquisitions Landon IP and Patrafee who will now operate under CPA Global.   Innography, the most recent acquisition will keep its name but will align look and feel towards the new brand.

Aistemos published a new report showing how to compare patenting strategies using Cipher by viewing patent filing patterns of similar companies in a sector.

Ip-search of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property published the annual Swiss biotech report, with a section on patenting of 3d-bioprinting and nanobiotechnology.

Understanding and searching patents written in any language is a major challenge for today’s IP professionals. One company providing solutions   - machine translations software provider Ionic Translation Machines grows with four new employees in business development and technical roles.