Searching for Beauty: How to Search for US Plant Patents

Spring is here, and since the azaleas are blooming and gardens everywhere are looking lovely, I thought I’d honor spring by writing a quick primer on searching for U.S. plant patents.  The USPTO website provides a thourough guide on how to apply for a plant patent, and this guide gives the following definition for plant patents in the U.S.:

A plant patent is granted by the Government to an inventor (or the inventor’s heirs or assigns) who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state. The grant, which lasts for 20 years from the date of filing the application, protects the inventor’s right to exclude others from asexually reproducing, selling, or using the plant so reproduced.

Plant patents account for only a very small percentage of total US patent applications and granted patents: in 2012, there were only 1,149 plant patent applications, out of 576,763 total applications, and 860 granted plant patents.  So where should you begin your hunt for this rare species of US patent?

Read on to learn the best search strategies for searching for plant patent records on the USPTO website and Google Patents!

Two Fantastic Updates to Free Patent Search Tools: Espacenet and PATENTSCOPE

Free patent search tools like Espacenet and PATENTSCOPE are an excellent resource for both casual  and professional patent searchers who want to quickly locate data on a specific patent document or scope out more detailed citation, legal status, and family data for both US and non-US patent documents. Recently, both Espacenet (created by the EPO) and PATENTSCOPE (created by WIPO) released some useful new updates: direct links to the Common Citation Document (CCD) viewer are now accessible from INPADOC family lists on Espacenet, and a new collection of US patent documents has been added to PATENTSCOPE. 

After the jump, learn about the new citation viewing features for INPADOC families on Espacenet, and find out the coverage of PATENTSCOPE’s new US collection!

Free Mexican Patent, Trademark, and Design Search Tools: VIDOC and SIGA

Patent search professionals will mainly rely on subscription patent databases to locate worldwide patent prior art, but sometimes full-text versions of documents or specific bibliographic/legal status data can be quickly located for free through the online services available on intellectual property office websites. IP office websites also often offer a wide range of additional search options for other types of intellectual property, such as trademarks, industrial designs, and even copyright records.  In past posts, I’ve reviewed the free patent and IP search resources available on a variety of IP office websites, including the intellectual property offices of France, Singapore, and Sweden.  In today’s post, I’d like to give a brief overview of the patent, trademark, and design search options available through the website of the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI). In particular, the IMPI website offers VIDOC, a search tool for locating the detailed record and related full-text documents for a variety of Mexican intellectual property records, including patent and trademarks.  SIGA is another service accessible on the IMPI website that allows users to create queries through a variety of search forms in order to locate records from the Mexican Industrial Property Gazette.

Read on for a description of the broad search and display options for Mexican patent, trademark, and design records accessible through various online services within the IMPI website, including VIDOC and SIGA.

A Free Online Portal of Swiss Intellectual Property: Swissreg

I’ll admit, my interest in exploring the online search portals for various intellectual property office websites has gotten a bit out of hand. From Hungary to Singapore, I’ve taken a world tour of the many innovative websites that offer free access to a broad assortment of intellectual property records, ranging from utility patents and industrial designs to trademark and copyright records. This obsession for exploring worldwide IP portals has even created an entire section on Intellogist dedicated to patent authority websites.  I recently visited the free online IP search portal for the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, called Swissreg, which allows users to search through data on Swiss patents, trademarks, designs, SPCs, and even topographies.  This portal offers a variety of fielded search forms for each intellectual property type (except topographies), and users can view bibliographic details and legal status information for each IP record.  Links are also provided for patent results to the full documents accessible on Espacenet.

Continue reading for an overview of the coverage, search, and display options on the Swiss IP search portal Swissreg!

The 3 Best Ways to Find Google Search Product News

In 2012, I discussed some of the best websites for locating database updates and search platform news.  A network of blogs and websites exists that caters specifically to professional searchers and IT specialists, and these sites discuss the latest updates to popular patent and non-patent literature search platforms.  The websites for specific database and search systems also often list the latest news about their respective search platforms, although these press releases are usually rather promotional in comparison to the more objective search engine news sites.  One specific search platform mentioned frequently on these sites is both highly utilized and highly controversial within the prior art search community: Google.

Google produces a number of useful products that often provide a good starting point for patent and non-patent literature (NPL) prior art searches, such as Google Scholar, Google Books, and Google Patents.  Users should remember, however, that Google is not the end-all resource for prior art searches.  Both free and subscription patent and non-patent literature (NPL) databases exist that contain specialized collections of patent records, scholarly journal articles, etc. that aren’t accessible at all on Google.  The Google search algorithm will also never replace the human strategy, technical knowledge, search skills, and multilingual knowledge of professional patent searchers. Just as a machine translation tool like Google Translate can’t replace the knowledge and comprehension of a professional human translator, Google search products can’t replace the expertise and strategy of a professional searcher.  Google is just one of many search resources in the patent searcher’s tool belt.

Keeping that caveat in mind, Google products still provide an excellent starting point for scoping out relevant prior art (especially non-patent literature), so searchers should stay up-to-date on the latest Google news and product releases.  After the jump, learn about three techniques for finding the latest Google search news!

5 Unique Ways to Refine or Expand Result Sets with EBSCO Discovery Service

EBSCO Industries has developed a number of innovative search tools accessible on its flagship platform, EBSCOhost.  For instance, EBSCOhost offers a unique visual search option which we profiled in a 2011 blog post. EBSCO also produces the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), a customized index of an institution’s information resources (catalogs, institutional repositories, full-text subscription databases, etc.) that gives users access to the content through a single search form.  EDS also includes access to the EDS Base Index, which provides metadata for a wide range of materials, ranging from journals and conference proceedings to CDs and DVDs. EDS uses a technology called “platform blending” to provide relevant results from a variety of subject indexes (which the user must be subscribed to on the EBSCOhost platform).  The platform blending technology allows users to search by the subject headings from controlled vocabularies through the EDS platform.  Professional patent searchers may find this tool to be a useful way to efficiently search all of their organization’s non-patent literature resources through a single flexible interface.

I recently had the opportunity to test EDS, and I was particularly impressed by the variety of tools which the search platform offered for refining or expanding result sets within both the initial search form and the hit list.  EDS includes options to limit the search by discipline, subject, or content provider, and integrated searches and widgets may be used to expand the number of results.   After the jump, learn about five different ways users can expand or limit their result set on EDS!

Search Reports, Patent Documents, and File Histories from Brazil through e-Patentes

Professional patent searchers will often need to search for both patent and non-patent literature (NPL) prior art on a global scale during an exhaustive validity search.  Multilingual search capabilities, access to a wide range of both free and subscription patent and NPL databases, and the knowledge and skill to thoroughly search these systems are all necessary components for a successful global prior art search. Patent search provider Landon IP offers the most thorough global prior art searches available, thanks to a team of highly skilled multilingual patent search professionals who can skillfully utilize a range of patent and non-patent literature search systems from around the world.  The in-depth search system information available through Intellogist provides a glimpse into the global prior art search resources which Landon IP searchers utilize on a daily basis.

For example, today we’ll take a quick look at a free resource listed on Intellogist called e-Patentes, which can be used to locate PDF copies of Brazilian patent documents, as well as the search reports and file history papers related to these Brazilian patent records.

Read on to learn about e-Patentes, one of many global patent search resources described on Intellogist!

The Next Google Scholar? Scholrly’s Potential for Locating Non-Patent Literature

Scholrly is a free search engine for academic writing that we first heard about back in the summer of 2012, and the public Beta version of this site was recently released in early January 2013, after six months of private beta testing. The service currently covers the field of computer science, but the creators plan to eventually expand the coverage of the service. Back in 2012, I wondered if Scholrly may one day replace Google Scholar as the easiest free search tool for quickly locating academic writing that may be used as non-patent literature (NPL) prior art by professional patent searchers.  I’ve finally gotten the chance to test the Scholrly search interface, and the hit list and full record views for both article and author results offer some unique data formatted in very useful displays for quickly locating related articles and authors. The quick and advanced search options on Scholrly are very run-of-the-mill, though, and no secondary filtering options are offered in the hit list.

After the jump, learn about the search and display features for the new Scholrly search engine, and see how it measures up to Google Scholar!

Meeting the Challenges of Data Collection and Analysis

As a leader in patent analysis, Landon IP has expert searchers who answer complex questions on a daily basis to produce the highest quality results. If you work with patents, you know the obstacles we face: data collections are huge and unwieldy; errors in the data are rampant; and in short, nothing involving patent data is ever easy. Today, I’m going to share some of our most basic strategies for producing high-quality datasets that lead to reliable results. Read on to get an insight into these best practices.

USPC-to-CPC Concordance Tool Now Available on the USPTO Website!

On January 1, 2013, the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) completely replaced ECLA, and all US published applications will now carry CPC classifications. The EPO’s Espacenet search system has already added a CPC search tool to its portal, and many subscription-based patent search systems have also integrated the CPC into their US and EP patent records and search options. The official CPC website currently offers an “ECLA to CPC to IPC” concordance table for users who need find a relevant CPC symbol that corresponds to an IPC or ECLA classification symbol.  The USPTO website now offers an additional useful tool to help users locate the correct CPC symbol by searching for a corresponding US Patent Classification (USPC) symbol. With this tool, users can enter any USPC symbol and automatically generate a list of the closest corresponding CPC symbols.

After the jump, Landon IP’s librarian Kristin Whitman provides a brief guide on how to use the “Statistical Mapping from USPC to CPC” concordance tool!