China Leads US in Patent Applications

In 2011 China surpassed the US in patent application filings, according to data compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization and reported in the Economist. The State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China (SIPO) received 526,412 applications in 2011, compared to slightly more than 500,000 at the USPTO and approximately 340,000 at the Japan Patent Office. In related news, the European Patent Office and SIPO recently announced that Chinese to English machine translation is now available in its Patent Translate service, which is integrated with Espacenet. An additional four million Chinese patent documents are now available in Espacenet.

Earthquake-proof Buildings

The 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on March 11 is a massive natural disaster and human tragedy, but it could have been much worse. News reports have credited Japan`s strict building codes with saving countless lives. Thanks to Japanese engineering, thousands of buildings and other structures survived the initial earthquake and numerous aftershocks. Japan`s leadership in earthquake resistant technologies is evident in the patent record. Japanese engineers and scientist have filed almost 70 percent of the patent applications related to protecting structures from earthquakes. 

The main IPC codes related to earthquake-resistant structures are: 

• E04H 9/02 - Buildings .. withstanding earthquakes or sinking of ground
• E02D 27/34 - Foundations for sinking or earthquake territories

In espacenet there are 15,180 patent documents classified in E04H 9/02, 71 percent (10,816) of these are JP documents. About 4,159 patent documents are classified in E02D 27/34, 60 percent (2,479) are JP documents.

Some of the leading patent assignees in this field are Japanese corporations, including Kajima, Oiles, Shimzu, and Nippon Steel.

New ECLA Codes for Green Technologies

The European Patent Office has created a new classification scheme for green technologies and applications related to the mitigation of climate change. The new category, identified as Y02 in the ECLA classification, has two main subclasses:

* Y02C - CAPTURE, STORAGE, SEQUESTRATION OR DISPOSAL OF GREENHOUSE
GASES [GHG]
* Y02E - REDUCTION OF GREENHOUSE GASES [GHG] EMISSION, RELATED TO
ENERGY GENERATION, TRANSMISSION OR DISTRIBUTION [N1006]

Each subclass is further subdivided into dozens of sub-groups. There are about 17,000 patents classified in Y02 but more will appear in the coming weeks.

US Assignment Data in INPADOC

The EPO recently announced that US assignment data will be updated weekly instead of bimonthly in the INPADOC legal status database, which also means that it will be available via esp@cenet.

The data will be captured from the USPTO's assignment database one week after it is posted.

This is a much appreciated improvement. It will save searchers a lot of time switching back and forth between esp@cenet/INPADOC and the USPTO database.

Reporting Data Errors in Patent Databases

Kudos to esp@cenet for providing an easy and convenient way for users to report data errors. Each record includes a link to an error reporting form; all you have to do is click and fill in a few lines. This week I reported my first error (an incorrect application number and date) and within two days the record was updated.

Why don't more patent offices do this? Patent databases are teeming with errors. You'd think they would take advantage of the tens of thousands of users who use their databases every day.

The USPTO provides an e-mail for reporting data errors but it's located on a page outside the database, which means that you have to stop your search, open up a new window, find the page and then compose an e-mail. Very cumbersome.

I wasn't able to find any way to report an error in the WIPO's PatentScope. The CIPO's Canadian Patent Database includes the e-mail and telephone number for the Client Service Centre in each record, but it doesn't make it clear that you can or should report errors.

Retrospective Kind Codes in Espacenet

The other day a colleague asked me why an "A" appeared at the end of older US patent numbers in espacenet records.




I immediately answered that it's a document kind code: "A" is used for the first publication, "B" for the second and "C" for the third. However, something was odd about their presence in espacenet. The USPTO only started applying kind codes to patent documents in 2001, so why did they appear in older patents? Apparently, espacenet is retrospectively applying them to patent numbers.

This might be confusing to some searchers because the "A" kind code is generally associated with published applications, not issued patents, which are usually marked "B" or "C". However, some countries only recently started publishing applications. For example, the US in 2001 and Canada in 1990. In these cases, the issued patent was the first publication, hence the "A". From Jan. 1, 2001 forward, US patents are marked "B". Canadian patents were marked "A" prior to Oct. 1, 1989 and "C" afterward.

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.

Espacenet Enhancements

This morning I discovered several nice enhancements in esp@cenet:

1. Expanded search terms
For years the maximum number of search terms you could input in any esp@cenet field was four. This limitation appears to have been lifted. I was able to successfully run searches using five or more terms.

2. Highlighted search terms
Search terms are now highlighted in retrieved titles and abstracts.

3. Sorting search results
Search results can be sorted by priority date, inventor, applicant, ECLA code and upload date.

The latest issue of the EPO's Patent Information News hints at more improvements to come later this year.

New Esp@cenet Improvements

It's October... the time of year when patent searchers wait and watch for news from esp@cenet. The EPO rolled out its latest esp@cenet improvements this week.

The most impressive is a beta search function called SmartSearch. SmartSearch allows the user to enter terms such as inventor name, keyword, publication number, date, etc. in any order and without having to specify a search field for each term. For example, entering "Bombardier CA 2007" will cause SmartSearch to look for Bombardier as the inventor/applicant, Canadian patent documents (2 letters indicating the country code) and 2007 as the publication date.

Clicking on "Refine Search" in a SmartSearch search results list will take you to the SmartSearch search page where you can explore more features. There are 22 search field identifiers, some of them representing more than one field. For example, TA searches both title and abstract. A maximum of 21 search terms can be combined with Boolean operators and a maximum of 4 search terms per search field are allowed. Date range searching and proximity operators are only available at the EP level. Full text searching of the claims and specification is not possible. A maximum of five brackets can be used per search. Left truncation is not permitted.

esp@cenet also has added an export function that exports bibliographic data from up to 30 records at a time from search hit lists and documents stored in the "My Patents List". The fields include title, publication number, publication date, inventor(s), applicant(s), international classification, European classification, application number, date of application, priority number(s) and cited documents. The capacity of the "My Patents List" has been expanded to 100 documents (previously 20).

Esp@cenet also has a new logo celebrating its tenth anniversary.

Austrian esp@cenet Upgrade - New Content and Search Capabilities

According to an announcement on the esp@cenet web site, an upgrade to the Austrian esp@cenet server has added additional content and capabilities. It now contains AT A and B documents and utility models from 1995 forward. Advanced search features now include full text searching, date range searching and multiple keywords. Prost!

Esp@cenet Improvements in 2008

The latest edition (1/2008) of Patent Information News, the European Patent Office's quarterly newsletter on patent information, documentation and searching, is now available.

Page 10 includes a list of esp@cenet improvements planned for 2008. They are:

1. Increase in the number of documents that can be stored in the "My Patents" list.
2. Relaxation in the page limit for PDF documents downloaded from esp@cenet.
3. Full-text searches for patent documents in English, French, and German.
4. Single search field accepting multiple search criteria.
5. Highlighting of search terms.
6. Exportable hit lists.
7. Date range searches.

All of these will be appreciated by patent searchers, but especially the ability to create sophisticated searches in a single search field, export lists and conduct date range searches. The current limit on the size of a document (about 50 pages) that can be downloaded is annoying at times, but since most patents have fewer than 50 pages it doesn't come up often. (At least not in my experience.) For US and WO patents, searchers can use alternate sites such as Patent Lens, pat2pdf and PatentScope to download lengthy patents.

EPO Survey: esp@cenet Exporting Function

The EPO is conducting a survey on a proposed improvement to esp@cenet scheduled for 2008. Specifically, they're asking for feedback on the usefulness of exporting data in CSV or XML formats.

Currently, the only patent office database (that I'm aware of) that supports exporting is the German PTO's DEPATISnet. You can download bib data in an Excel spreadsheet from up to 250 records at a time.

This is a wonderful development. At my university a number of engineering and business students take entrepreneurship courses that require them to use patent data to identify key companies/innovators, develop market profiles and analyze long-term industry trends. Being able to export data from esp@cenet would save them a lot of time. In my opinion, CSV is more useful than XML, especially for users such as students and private inventors who are not familiar with XML, since it can be easily imported into a spreadsheet for analysis.

If you're an esp@cenet user and would like to provide feedback, go to the esp@cenet forum at http://forum.espacenet.com/ and look in the Information Channel. You will need to register in order to submit comments and vote.

Chemical Structure Searching in Free Patent Databases?

The ability to search chemical compounds in public patent databases has always been very limited. Unlike commercial databases such as SciFinder Scholar, public patent databases have not offered tools for searching compounds by structure or formula. Nor do they include dictionaries of chemical synonyms. Searchers are pretty much limited to running keyword searches for chemical names, a time-consuming and highly inaccurate approach. This might change in the near future.

This week in Barcelona, Spain, Dr. Nigel Clarke of the European Patent Office is giving a presentation at the ICIC International Conference in Trends for Scientific Information Professionals on the possibility of adding a chemical structure search option to esp@cenet, the EPO's free patent database. The EPO recently surveyed esp@cenet users and found that there was much interest from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

This is interesting because it would the first time a national patent office has offered this type of very specialized search function. In general, patent offices design their online databases for the general public.

esp@cenet Survey

The EPO is running an online survey to gather feedback on what users find most and least useful about esp@cenet, and access to free patent information in general.

The EPO has an excellent track record of listening to users, so don't miss this opportunity to suggest improvements. Some improvements I'd like to see are the ability to sort search results and better integration of the ECLA classification search. While I love the ability to search and browse ECLA, transferring ECLA codes to the search form is clunky.

Note to Canadian residents: The survey asks users to identify their location. Unfortunately, Canada was omitted (by accident, I'm sure) from the list of countries. A request for correction has been made.