Digest II - May 2016

Month two of the Information Industry Digest (info blog) , and the new developments in commercial information world look just as fascinating as in the first! Following the same format, I’m covering the latest news from the world of commercial information, search, analytics, software and services. Patent, trademark and other IP information, academic, scientific, market, trade and other business data are all included, and are identified based on tracking 40 + information service and search solution providers. The list will be adapted as the blog evolves.

How do I decide what to include? New product introductions, and improvements to existing products, new services, are all included. Each digest will contain sections on content, search technology, post search results review, uses of patent, scientific, commercial information, information and IP services updates. This month I picked up news from information provider user meetings. For whilst there’s no denying the internet is the place for information, and social media is important for reaching and communicating with customers and potentials, we all know that nothing beats face-to-face meetings and discussions.

Content.

Patents. Those working with patent information usually need to search as comprehensively as possible, whether its for prior art, landscaping, invalidity or freedom to operate. Gridlogics have announced fifteen new authorities to their collection. The PatSeer database now contains full-text original language patent data from 42 authorities – these are EP, WO, US, JP, CN, KR, CA, DE, FR, GB, ES, AU, IN, CH, AT, BR, TH , RU, PH, SE, NO, DK , FI, BE, NL, LU, MX, AP, CO, DD, EA, IL, MA, MC, OA, TW, TJ, KG, AM, UZ, MD, GE. The collection also contains machine translations into English for JP, KR, CN, FR, DE, DK, FI, RU, BE, NL, LU. WIPS Global, the Korean patent information provider, currently expanding sales into Western markets, is also adding content, - and now contains full text Indian patent data from 2000, this data set, updated weekly is provided by Molecular Connections.

Academic, scientific, social sciences, research information
Academic literature and the data it creates, is growing in volume , even if not at the speed of patent publications.   A study from 2014 showed that global research output doubles every nine years, and in the same year 2,831,406 items of research output were indexed in Scopus.. This data can be used for tracking socio-economic outputs, a topic covered by Elsevier’s ‘What is research data?’ report. The US National Science Foundation’s latest report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2016, used data from Scopus, and Web of Science to gain a full picture. Data on article downloads, article citations, funding bodies, collaborations, and patent citations and applications resulting from the research, were all measured to draw conclusions on research outcomes.   CAS introduced ’ MethodsNow TM’ a new approach to finding information needed for chemists in the lab, and is available as an add-on to SciFinder.   The new service provides full information on ‘how-to-do’ analytical and synthetic methods, and should be very useful organic and synthetic pharmaceutical chemists and for analytical chemists in any industry. Disclosed procedures can be searched and these include materials, instrumentation, and reaction conditions. The data is sourced from top peer reviewed journals and patents. CAS has created a new index for the Methods to assist with curation and retrieval. The Bibliography of Asian Studies, (BAS) contains nearly 900,000 records of articles published worldwide from 1971, but with Asian content.   BAS is produced by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and is now on the EBSCO platform.

Search.

Text mining / text analytics/ NLP
A report comparing text mining / analytics companies was published this month by Forrester. The report compares 20 criteria over ten key companies:   Attivo, Cambridge Semantics, Clarabridge, Digital Reasoning, Expert System, HP Enterprise, IBM Watson, Linguamatics, OpenText and SAS. IBM Watson has introduced Tone Analyzer, which facilitates detection of ‘tone’ such as emotion, social and language in text, and other communication modes.

Patent searching
Gridlogic’s Patseer improved it’s find similar patents tool. Enter a patent number using the SIM field which can now be combined with other search criteria for more specificity and to reduce post search filtering.

Citations, searching, analytics and data tracking
Scientific citation tracking: Ex Libris, owned by ProQuest, released a Citation Trail capability as part of its Primo discovery and delivery solution. Primo Central contains a vast quantity of data, organised in individual databases. Citation trial is a forward and backward citation linking tool. Using citations has been recognised as an important method to identify subject-relevant documents (in patents and academic literature), since Eugene Garfield’s Science Citation Index.

Elsevier acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), founded in 1994, it will be added to Mendeley, to enhance both products. Interest in social sciences research is growing with the emerging focus on ‘Internet of Things ‘ and social innovation.

Healthcare citations and text mining
Plum™ Analytics, founded in 2012 is now owned by EBSCO. Plum Analytics has added ‘clinical citations, to its PlumX Suite. Plum is a built on five categories of metrics – Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media and Clinical Citations. Citations to an actual clinical usage. The clinical citations are gathered by DynaMed Plus, also owned by EBSCO. Doctors can use DynaMed to find evidence-based information when they need it at the ‘point of care’. PlumX text mines DynaMed Plus.

Answers - from NLP to NLU
Google has released SyntaxNet and TensorFlow as open source tools for developers. SyntaxNet a natural language processing (NLP) tool, is one component of TensorFlow. TensorFlow was developed by Google DeepMind, as an open source software library, aiming at NLU or Natural Language Understanding. The toolkit can be used to integrate text with images, photos and videos; it can also provide personalised analytics, suggestions, and answers.

Translation assist
Maybe a pre- or post- search function - Google Translate, is mobile, on Android devices natch. ‘ ‘Tap to Translate’ can translate between 103 languages (the number of languages Google has machine translation software). Google translate is the engine behind the EPO’s patent translate used on espacenet.

Commercial information and IP services company news.

Financial news
Thomson Reuters (TR) published first quarter results, which showed a 4% increase in revenues from Intellectual Property & Science division, this however, because the division is for sale, is counted as ‘Discontinued Operations ‘. TR IP and Science is expected to be sold by the end of 2016.

Services, Sales
The Australian Research Council (ARC) is now using Web of Science™ to help measure ARC national impact and assess benefits derived from university research. This national assessment exercise (NAE) is new for 2016 as part of the Australian government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda. The NAE will make use of title, topic and author information from Web of Science Core Collection, which contains over 12,000 multi-disciplinary academic journals and over 160,000 conference proceedings. TR promoted its ‘Virtual IP Office’ service , providing outsourcing services such as competitive intelligence, patenting and patentability focused services, IP administration, and IP due diligence tasks for clients.

Licensing information is difficult to find, rules vary on disclosures in different countries, and reporting is often limited, but one industry where M&A and licensing activities show no signs of abating is the pharmaceutical industry.   An award promoted by TR IP & Science highlights the leading deals in Biopharmaceutical Licensing and in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A).

User Meetings

Linguamatics hosted their Spring Text Mining Conference in Cambridge at the end of April (#LMSpring16), with an intensive day of talks, sandwiched between hands on workshops. Presenters focussed on text mining of real world data (RWD), which at Novo Nordisk includes patient data, data from clinicians, hospital data, data from those financing patient care and social media. PatientsLikeMe used text mining to gain a deeper understanding of adverse events to prescribed medicines, other talks showcased new uses of text mining, in research based on psychiatric assessment transcripts, and Roche presented a synonym / dictionary build approach to improve text mining of the scientific academic literature. Minesoft held ‘Patent Roadshow’ events around Europe showcasing Chemical Explorer, its new chemistry text mining tool, which can be helpful to find compounds anywhere in a patent document, and not only exemplified compounds, and Citation Tracker.

Events

Past events
RWS attended the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, in Washington where data analytics was a major theme of the conference, and Awapatent was at Cleantech Capital Day in Malmö, Sweden.

Forthcoming events
Aistemos and PatentSight are attending IPBC in Barcelona in June, and Nigel Swycher CEO of Aistemos will be speaking at the 1st Cambridge Information and Intellectual Property Meeting, UK, in July (co-organised by Extract Information).   Aistemos is also hosting its own event ‘IP Strategy in the Board Room’ – a discussion based event reviewing the changing role of IP and IP strategy.   Frank Langlotz, of the Swiss Federal Institute’s ip-search, is speaking at PATINFO, Ilmenau in June on Freedom to Operate or infringement search? Synonym or Not?