Guide to STN Patent Databases – Basic Version - Paton - TU Ilmenau

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26.1 Searches in full-text databases
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Guide to STN Patent Databases
Bibliographical databases, having meaningful titles, abstracts, and advanced indexing, are still the best sources for
searching prior-art publications. Anyway, full-text databases offer a number of options to either complement the
bibliographical databases or use them alone for sear Text searches
Comprehensive text coverage. This may be an advantage or a drawback.
Full-text databases hold a lot of unweighted text, which will tend to increase the number of hits and at the same
time decrease the relevance of the search results. To increase the relevance of the documents found proximity
operators should be used a lot. The FOCUS and DISPLAY OCCURENCES commands should also be employed to
identify relevant documents. Another way is to use selected search fields, e.g. /TI, /AB, /CLM, rather than searching
the full text.
On the other hand the comprehensive text coverage has the advantage that certain search terms, such as proper
names, very current or specific wordings, etc., will only appear here. This feature is often used when searching for
prior art to be used in an opposition. It may also be that the otherwise very good indexing in bibliographical
databases is less appropriate for certain fields of technology, e.g. if the field of search is a very new or dynamic one.
Full-text databases can be very helpful in these circumstances.
Timeliness. Full-text databases either import the machine-readable text provided by the patent offices or they
make use of an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to produce the full text. As the documents are not
edited manually they can be made available very quickly. Thus, full-text databases are often used at the same time
as bibliographical databases to cover very recent publications.
Additional bibliographic information. Full-text databases even offer extensive bibliographical information from
the original documents, such as the addresses of applicants, inventors, or legal representatives.
Full-text searches are often performed as multi-file searches (e.g. in PCTFULL, EPFULL, PATDPAFULL). The search
result is likely to include a number of publications from the same patent family, which should be combined using
their priority numbers. However, the priority numbers in full-text databases are often not in standard format, which
makes Multi-file and the
Family search examples illustrate this strategy.
The following table gives an overview of the contents and search options in full-text databases:
Database Contents Language SLART Images CAS
LS / FAM Classi-
Indexing
fication
AUPATFULL 1964-
EN BI, TI, AB, Ja Nein Nein IPC, EPC,
AUA, AUB,
AUC, AUD,
AUS
CLM, MCLM
ICO, IDT
CANPATFULL 1920-
EN, FR BI, TI, AB, Ja Nein Nein IPC, EPC,
CAA, CAB,
CAC, CAE, CAF
CLM, MCLM
ICO, IDT
EPFULL 1978-
DE, EN, FR BI, CLM, TI, Ja Nein LS Search IPC
EPA, EPB
AB, MCLM
LS/FAM Disp
FRFULL 1900-
FR, EN BI, TI, AB, Ja Nein LS/FAM Disp IPC
FRA
CLM, MCLM
GBFULL 1840-
EN BI, TI, AB, Ja Nein LS/FAM Disp IPC
GBA, GBB, GBC
CLM, MCLM
IFIPAT 1950-
USA, USP
EN BI, TI, AB, CLM Nein Ja (Chemie) LS/FAM Disp IPC, NCL
PATDPAFULL 1987-
DE, EN BI, TI, AB, Nein Nein LS/FAM Disp IPC
DEA, DEB, DEC,
DET, DEU
CLM, MCLM
PCTFULL 1978-
DE, EN, ES, BI, TI, AB, Ja Nein LS/FAM Disp IPC
WOA
FR
CLM, MCLM
RDISCLOSURE 1960- DE, EN, FR,
SV
BI, TI Ja Nein Nein IPC, ECLA