Access to and Searching Non-Patent Literature:

On-Line Scientific and Technical Journals

Stanley KowalskiFranklin Pierce Law Center

With the emergence of a knowledge based economy, more and more research teams, academic or industrial, produce results which can be both published in academic journals and patented.

 

Non-Patent Literature  Scientific journals articles Book chapters Conference papers

Non

Patent Literature

(NPL)

Academic Journals

Books Monographs

Trade Journals

Conference Proceedings

Thesis Technical Reports

Encyclopedias Dictionary

Non Patent Literature

Sources

Journals

Books, Thesis, Technical reports, Monographs

Standards

Conference Proceedings

Company Disclosures

Secondary Publishers

INSPEC, CAS, COMPDX, BIOSIS,

MEDLINE, FSTA

Encyclopedia Dictionaries

Non Patent Literature

Sources

Patent Literature Databases

Search Engine or Database

Access Link Searches Provided Full Text vs. Abstracts

Patent Lens Public www.patentlens.net/daisy/patentlens/patentlens.html Full text of over 8 million patents and applications. Updated weekly with information from WIPO, USPTO, EPO and IP Australia.

Can view in full text mode or PDF mode.

United States Patent & Trademark Office (Patents)

Public http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html Searches US Patents and Published Patent Applications.

Full text, image is problematic. No PDF.

Google Patents Public http://www.google.com/patents Free database covering the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO.

Abstracts, full text and PDF.

Scirus Public http://scirus.com/ Approx. 450 million scientific items.

Abstracts, full text and PDF when available.

Patent Storm Public http://www.patentstorm.us/ U. S. Patents Patent Applications

Abstracts, full text and PDF (clickable features)

Non Patent Literature Database

Search Engine or Database Access Link Searches Provided Full Text vs.

Abstracts

PubMed Central (PMC) Public http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ Free access archive of complete collection of biomedical and life sciences journal articles from NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology information.

Abstracts and links to full text when available.

PubMed/ Medline Public http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez Free access archive of biomedical literature and is also useful when search topic may be more general science or chemistry.

Abstracts and links to full text when available.

Medline Plus Public http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ Contains carefully selected links to web resources with health information on > 740 topics and > 1350 organizations.

Abstracts and links to full text when available.

Non Patent Literature Database

Search Engine or Database

Access Link Searches Provided Full Text vs.

Abstracts

MeSH – Medical Subject Headings

Public http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html A listing of U S National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary for indexing articles for MEDLINE/PubMed.

When available

Google Scholar Public http://scholar.google.com/ Free database for broad search for scholarly publications.

Abstracts and links to full text when available

NTIS (National Technical Information Service)

Public http://ntis.gov/ Largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, biotechnology, the environment, health & safety, and business related information.

Seems to provide abstracts only.

TESS – Trademark electronic search system

Public http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm TESS contains more than 4 million pending, registered and dead federal trademarks.

N/A

Publications and patents as information supports have many analogous features for example: author/inventor institution/assignee bibliographic referencing/patent system referencing bibliometric classification/official classification abstract full text reference to scientific literature/reference to patent

or non-patent literature, etc.

For Example, note the congruence of inventors and authors, and published and patented technologies in the following example of HIV vaccine technology:

DNA Vaccination with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 SF162DV2 Envelope Elicits Immune Responses

That Offer Partial Protection from Simian/Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection to CD81 T-Cell-Depleted

Rhesus Macaques

JOURNAL OF VIROLOGY, Feb. 2001, p. 1547–1550

S. CHERPELIS,1 I. SHRIVASTAVA,2 A. GETTIE,1,3 X. JIN,1 D. D. HO,1 S. W. BARNETT,2 AND L. STAMATATOS1*

Note the congruence between assignee/institution and inventor/author and technology covered in the following journal publication and patent:

Plant Physiology, October 1999, Vol. 121, pp. 453–460, www.plantphysiol.org

Glucose Polyester Biosynthesis. Purification and Characterization of a Glucose

Acyltransferase

Alice X. Li, Nancy Eannetta, Gurdev S. Ghangas, and John C. Steffens

Department of Plant Breeding, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853

However, there are important caveats!

Patent information may not always be used as source for scientific technical information; in addition information disclosed in patents does not always appear in non-patent literature later.

Methods and results published in academic journals must be informative enough firstly to convince referees, secondly to attract a large scope of potential users and citers as soon as possible.

A patent, however, is both a legal document and a piece of technical literature. This shapes well known peculiarities of patent documents; for example, poorly informative original titles.

Publications are a good representation of the contents of science.

Patents (or kindred IPR forms) collect a large part of technological information, even though the patent combines several functions.

One can generally expect, therefore, different patterns of information disclosure in scientific publications and patents.

Therefore, these two sources of information are neither exclusive nor inclusive, but rather complimentary.

When doing research, it is important to research both patent and non-patent literature, regardless of the intent, i.e., whether for prior art searching, freedom to operate analysis or patent invalidation research.

Some examples of web-based non-patent literature

resources

Non-Patent Literature (examples)

Publishers’ own websites:Found through PubMed, LinkOut or through direct searching;

British Libraryhttp://www.bl.uk/services/document/dsc.html;

CAS Document Detective Service http://www.cas.org/Support/dds.html

Non-Patent Literature (examples)

Purdue Univ. Tech. Info Servicehttp://www.tis.purdue.edu/html/index.html

U. Minn. Biomedical Info. Servicehttp://www.biomed.lib.umn.edu/bis/bismain.html

A research university library near you!

Internet Resources (examples) Meta Search Engines- Google Scholar:

http://scholar.google.com/ - Scirus: http://www.scirus.com - Entrez:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Entrez Citation Tracking Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

However, it is crucial to remember that current search engines may still largely ignore the contents of the Library of Congress, the US Patent and Trademark database, newspaper archives, and many other valuable sources of information because their contents are not “crawlable”.

Until recently, the multidisciplinary data sources for patents and publications were separated. The trend today is towards an integration of knowledge information whatever the nature. A new sign perhaps is the connection between ISI publications and Derwent patents by navigation along the citation linkages. The navigation between documents along a lexical connection is also likely to expand.

Patent and non-patent literature are different but also complimentary. Searching both will inform as to the technologies considered, the inventors and their respective assignees.

Robert J. W. Tijssen Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, 695-715Patent and Literature Search Tools (rev. April 2008) JHUJeffrey J. Berns AALL Annual Meeting and Conference, 2005 San AntonicCGIAR Centre publications as Prior artElise Bassecoulard Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, 665-694Mervyn Bregonje World Patent Information; Dec 2005, Vol. 27 Issue 4, p309-315, 7pEuropean Patent Office, The Hague Search Matters 2009

References used for this presentation