PatentScope Adds Canadian National Collection

An early Christmas present from the WIPO:

PatentScope now includes the Canadian national collection from ~1920 forward. No PDFs yet, it appears, but full text (based on OCR) is available for some patents. A few pre-1970s patents have IPC codes, so keyword searching may be required for some types of searches. This gives researchers another option for searching Canadian patents from the early 20^th century forward.

Other national collections to be added in the next few months include the Eurasian Patent Office, Germany, and UK.

PatentScope Has JP Data

Japanese patent documents are now available in PatentScope. The JP national collection is the 29th added to the system and includes more than 3 million records from January 2004 through July 2012. New data will be added weekly.

JP documents can be searched by number or IPC classification. But in order to search by name or keyword, one has to use PatentScope's Cross Lingual Expansion search mode.

PatentScope Improvements

The latest improvements to PatentScope include faster query response time, new and enhanced Boolean operators, improved search term highlighting and query tree displays. The operator NEAR can now be used with other Boolean operators and a new operator, BEFORE, can be used to search words in a specific order, e.g. fuel BEFORE cell.  

PatentScope Adds PCT Licensing Information

PatentScope now includes licensing information for PCT applications. PCT applicants who wish to make their applications available for licensing may request so by filing the appropriate forms. (See the December 2011 PCT Newsletter.) As of March 19, only a handful of published applications have licensing information.

PatentScope Adds Russian/Soviet Patents

PatentScope now includes records for Russian and Soviet patent documents from 1919 to 2010, about 1.4 million patent documents. Full-text is not include, but abstracts are available from 1960 forward.

PatentScope Adds Kenyan Patents

The national patent collection of Kenya (KE) is now available in PatentScope. Bibliographic records for about 323 patent documents published from May 1996 to Jan. 2011 are included. Full-text documents are not available at this time.

Patentscope 1.0 Retires on Oct. 13

WIPO will phase out its PatentScope "Classic" search system on Oct. 13, 2011. All searches will be directed to the new PatentScope, which was introduced in 2009. WIPO launched the original PatentScope in 2003.

PatentScope Mobile

PatentScope now offers a mobile search interface. As far as I know, this is the first patent office database optimized for mobile devices.

Also read that WIPO is planning to add "the bulk" of patent data from the IP5 patent offices, e.g. EPO, USPTO, JPO, SIPO and KIPO, to PatentScope in 2011. The EPO data was added a couple of months ago.

This will be a great addition to an already excellent tool.

PatentScope Adds EPO Collection

The EPO patent document backfile, which includes bibliographic data from 1978 through mid-2010 and full-text data from 1996 through mid-2010, is now available in PatentScope. With this addition, the WIPO's patent search system has 7.7 million patent documents from 21 regional and national patent offices.

Earlier this year PatentScope added the national patent collections of Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Peru and Uruguay. Search interfaces in Korea, Russian and Spanish have also been deployed.

PatentScope Adds Patents of Brazil

PatentScope now includes the national patent collection of Brazil. Data coverage begins in 1972 for bibliographic data and 1989 for abstracts. The total number of records is about 147,000.

PCT Coverage in Public Patent Databases

How the data in a database or search engine is structured is as important (or more so) as the data itself.

I was reminded of this old rule-of-thumb a couple of weeks ago when I decided to compare coverage of PCT applications in public patent databases, namely PatentScope, FreePatentsOnline, esp@cenet, and Patent Lens. The results were fairly consistent until I got to Patent Lens, where my benchmark searches retrieved far more documents than the other three databases. (See table below.)

Most surprising was that my date of publication searches retrieved many more documents for five of the six dates I had selected. If PatentScope, which is the official record of the WIPO, says that 3,280 PCT applications were published on March 19, 2009, why did Patent Lens tell me it found 4,364? Obviously, this has serious implications for anyone using Patent Lens to do competitive intelligence, market research or simply track the number of PCTs filed by their organization.

Fortunately, the friendly folks at Patent Lens provided the explanation: Patent Lens indexes all versions of published PCTs, which inflates the number of retrieved documents. This includes subsequently published international search reports (A3 or A9), amended (A4) and corrected versions (A9). PatentScope and espacenet link these documents to the record for the initial publication (A1 or A2). FreePatentsOnline's PCT coverage apparently includes only the first published application (A1 or A2), although I haven't yet confirmed it. This explains the consistency in search results in FPO, PatentScope and esp@cenet.

So what are the practical implications for non-IP professionals who use Patent Lens? Well, if a researcher or tenure-track professor searches his or her name or university, they may get an inflated document count.

New Kind Codes for Republished PCT Documents

WIPO is introducing three new kind codes for republished international applications that will be implemented on Jan. 1, 2009. The codes are:

• A4 = Later publication of amended claims and/or statement (PCT Article 19) with revised front page
• A8 = International application republished with corrections to front page bibliographic data
• A9 = International application or ISR republished with corrections, alterations or supplements (see also WIPO Standard ST.50)

PatentScope Suppresses Inventor Address Data

WIPO has announced that due to privacy concerns it will remove address data for inventors and individual applicants from its PatentScope database. The data will not be indexed or displayed in Internet search engines. This will not affect PatentScope searches or RSS search alerts. I ran several test searches based on city names and postal codes and retrieved the expected documents, although address data did not appear in individual records. However, address data will still appear on the frontpage of PCT documents in PDF format.

It is unclear if this policy will apply to WIPO data obtained by third-party database producers such as FreePatentsOnline and Patent Lens. As of December 30, inventor address data from PCT documents was still indexed and displayed in Patent Lens.