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

Types of search
Database Contents Language SLART Images CAS
LS / FAM Classi-
Indexing
fication
USPATALL 1790-
EN BI, AB, TI Nein Ja Nein IPC, NCL
1975-
2001
CLM, ECLM
26.2 Accessing the full text
Basically, there are two ways to get the full text of a patent document:
Display the documents in ASCII format in one of the full-text databases (EPFULL, FRFULL, GBFULL, IFIPAT,
PATDPAFULL, PCTFULL, RDISCLOSURE, USPATFULL, USPAT2, USPATOLD)
Display the page images of a document (RDISCLOSURE)
Display or order the full document using the FULLTEXT link
STN Express or STN on the WEB can be used. An Internet browser has to be installed on the computer.
26.2.1 Displaying documents from full-text databases
The full text of patent publications is stored in the AUPATFULL, CANPATFULL, EPFULL, FRFULL, GBFULL, IFIPAT,
PATDPAFULL, PCTFULL, RDISCLOSURE, USPATFULL/USPAT2 and USPATOLD databases (in IFIPAT only the claims of
US patents). It can be displayed online or printed directly. For information on the contents and time coverage see
the database Patent images
An Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is used to create the texts in the AUPATFULL, CANPATFULL,
FRFULL, GBFULL, PCTFULL and USPATOLD databases. This means that there may be spelling errors and text portions
may be incomplete. A small number of documents have no text at all due to errors in the scan process.
In PCTFULL the line length should be set to 100 to display the full text of a document in order to prevent
unnecessary line breaks:
=> SET LINELENGTH 100
Once the display is complete the line length should be reset to the usual 80.
26.2.2 FULLTEXT Link
A FULLTEXT link is available for every document in all bibliographical and full text databases if at least the
bibliographical details are displayed. (There is no link if e.g. only the title is displayed.) When the link is clicked the
ways STN offers to get the full text are displayed:
Web-based document resources
Page images can be downloaded free of charge from esp@acenet (European Patent Office, PDF) and from
the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, single pages, TIFF).
Fee-based document resources
Download document: The full text (single PDF file) can be downloaded immediately. A fee applies.
Order document: You can order the full text from FIZ AUTODOC against a fee (as a PDF file or printed).
An order form will be displayed.
If any special software is needed to display images you will be alerted to this.
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