Search options available in STN databases - FIZ Karlsruhe

25 Full text
25.1 Searches in full-text databases
Types of search
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 searching by 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 it neces 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:
EPFULL PCTFULL USPATALL PATDPA- FRFULL GBFULL RDISCLO- IFIPAT
FULL
SURE
Cover- 1978- 1978- 1790- 1987- 1900- 1840- 1960- 1950age
EPA, EPB WOA 1975- DEA, DEB, FRA GBA, GBB,
USA, USP
2001 DEC, DET,
DEU
GBC
Lan- EN, FR, DE DE, EN, ES EN DE, EN FR, EN EN DE, EN, FR, EN
guages
FR
SV
SLART BI, CLM, TI, BI BI, AB, TI BI, TI, AB, BI BI BI, TI BI
AB, MCLM
CLM, ECLM CLM, MCLM
Images Yes Yes (No No Yes Yes Yes No
CAS
indexing
No No Yes No No No No Yes (chem.)
LS / FAM LS search LS / FAM No LS / FAM LS / FAM LS / FAM No LS / FAM
LS / FAM
Disp
Disp
Disp
Disp Disp
Disp
Classification
IPC IPC NCL, IPC IPC IPC IPC IPC, ECLA IPC, NCL
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