Patent Databases

Free
* PatentLens (by Cambia)
o http://www.patentlens.net/
o 10,702,297 patent documents
o updated Dec 21, 2010 (No CA, only US, Europe, Australia, WIPO/PCT)
o Sequence Search Facility
o RSS feeds
o limitations with alternate spellings eg. harbor / harbour, names eg. J. Smith vs John Smith, OCR processed
o great documentation
o nice UI
o PatentFamily - Easily find patent numbers filed to other countries, current status of patent
o sequence DB last updated May, 2, 2010
o Full text documents include:
+ 1976 onwards - All US granted patents
+ mid-1998 onwards - All Australian granted patents
+ 1980 onwards - EP-B granted patents
+ 1978 onwards - WO-A/PCT patents
* USPTO - US Patent and Trademark Office, old interface, lots of scrolling down
o Publication Site for Issued and Published Sequences (PSIPS) http://seqdata.uspto.gov/
o Shopping cart?
* GenBank/Entrez
o cystic fibrosis[All Fields] AND (all[filter] AND gbdiv_pat[PROP])
o http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/
* DNA Patent Database http://dnapatents.georgetown.edu/
+ DPD updated February 2, 2011
+ U.S. Granted Patents = 57,176
+ U.S. Patent Applications = 87,438
* Google Patents (better interface but can only read / download PDF)
* JPO / IPDL - Industrial Property Digital Library (Japanese)
* EPO (European Patent Office)
* CIPO (Canada)
* World / European? http://ep.espacenet.com
* WPO (PatentScope) http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/
* Blogs, newsletters, magazines - http://www.ipfrontline.com/, mailing lists



Commercial
* Thomson Reuters / Derwent -
o DWPI (Derwent World Patents Index)
o GENESEQ (manually and professionally curated, continually growing with ~600 unique patents every two weeks)
o http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/geneseq/
o patent titles and abstracts written in English — using clear, consistent, industry-specific terms.
o Delphion
+ $4.00 each time you perform a search
+ $6.00 for each full Derwent Record viewed
+ http://www.delphion.com
o MicroPatent, WestLaw
* CAS (a division of the American Chemical Society) CAPlus
o 1,500 key scientific journals
o Available within 2 days of patent’s issuance (JPO, USPTO, CIP, etc.)
+ Fully indexed by scientist within 27 days
o http://www.cas.org/expertise/cascontent/caplus/index.html
o Use STN
+ STN - operated jointly by CAS, FIZ Karlsruhe and JAICI
o 1907 to the present, plus many records from earlier years
o Books, Dissertations, Reviews, etc.
* LexisNexis
o Legal Store - Bookstore
o Law firms, Corporate, Academic, and Government solutions
o provides customers with access to billions of searchable documents and records from more than 45,000 legal, news and business sources.
o http://www.lexisnexis.com
* Cooler looking websites, fast, excellent tutorial, documentation, analytical tools, mobile apps, blogs, up-to-date info, powerful search and indexing



Notes
* Commercial websites UI are more user friendly, offers high quality annotations, better support and training, analysis tools? over free ones but obviously costs more (negotiable?)
* Maybe give a couple of commercial products a test drive first
* Sequence BLAST search available for commercial (Thomson, CAS) and public (GenBank, PatentLens)
* Fairly good coverage dating back from 1970s and fairly fast
* Full text search obtained through OCR scanning of documents
* Main difficulty comes from search terms entered, alternate spellings, author’s name formatting, finding the write word to search, (this is what DWPI is trying to address)



References
* Jon R. Cavicchi, Intellectual Property Research Tools and Strategies: Lexis vs. Westlaw for Research--Better, Different, or Same and the QWERTY Effect?, 47 IDEA 363 (2007).
o LexisNexis vs Westlaw - Qwerty effect - history matters, also personal feel (not so much on function)
* G. Gann Xu, Amie Webster, and Ellen Doran, “Patent sequence databases,” World Patent Information 24, no. 2 (June 2002): 95-101.
* http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/patents.shtml