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How to access this information

A really thorough search of the patent literature is best left to the experts, such as patent agents and patent information specialists. They have the know-how required to undertake the exhaustive trawl through the many electronic databases, hard copy and the expertise to understand what they find. The Internet has opened up the whole area of patents to anybody by providing the ability to search and view worldwide for free. It is possible to do a reasonable useable search on the Internet if you spend time at the appropriate websites and understand something of the patent system.

This fact sheet covers some of the quirks of the patent system that any searcher needs to be aware of.

Word Searching

Words may be insufficient when doing a search in patent documents for a range of reasons.

Language

Patents are international in nature and dealt with via international treaties, so any searcher must be aware of the use of languages other than English in these documents, though English is the predominant language in documents. A comprehensive search must consider patents from other countries, most of which will not be in our mother tongue. This brings problems about multi-lingual synonyms, searching in different character sets, need for translation, character sets, etc.

Legal Speak

Patents are legal documents and are not necessarily written for ease of searching; they are drafted to be defended in court or satisfy technical specifications and needs. Put simply this means that they are not in everyday English but in a format built up through years of legal process.

For example, the words "comprising" and "consisting of" seem to be nearly identical in normal English, but in patent law the former means having at least certain properties and the latter means having only these properties.

Terminology

A patent document is unlike any other technical article, since it performs a dual function - as a legally binding description of the scope of a piece of intellectual property, and as a technical disclosure to third parties of how the invention works. Consequently, the language used is a compromise between legal and technical jargon. A patent agent will never call a spade a spade if they can call it a 'substantially planar earth-moving implement with coaxial leveraging means'.

Databases

There is no consistent standard for patent sites and many have little or no text to search in the first place. Patent collections on the Internet are not complete. Some sites contain complete texts Some sites contain complete texts such as the US Patent and Trademark Office site, while the European Patent Office's esp@cenet site, has only abstracts and titles. Even files which contain full texts do not hold a historical record. The USPTO system provides access to US patents since 1790 but has no text at all prior to 1976 Images Patent concepts in all documents contain non-word information in the form of technical drawings, chemical or mathematical formulae, electrical circuit diagrams, biochemical genetic sequences and even photographs. If you rely only on a word search then you will miss documents on your topic.

The Classification Code Systems

One way around the legal speak and general word problems outlined previously is to use either International or National Classification Codes which are used to group similar patents together under a common Classification Code. By using a code you can group similar patents quickly and then go through them in detail.

One of the big advantages when searching classes is improved coverage. Particularly as patent offices digitise their files, with the older segments being limited to simple bibliographic elements such as a publication number and a classification mark, rather than expensive OCR scanning of the entire text.

US Classification Codes allow searching by the Classification Code itself or words found in the definition which contain general terminology and some legal speak.

You can conduct a narrow search in a patent file and then use one of the Codes found on one of the retrieved patents that is on target. US examiners prefer the US Codes to the International Codes, but other countries are the opposite. Thus, it is best to use the US Codes over the International Codes when searching the US files and vice versa with each other country.

International codes are the most commonly used patent classifications and utilised by some 90 countries.

The Esp@cenet site has the ClassPat link <http://l2.espacenet.com/eclasrch>), which lets you enter a range of subject words. These are matched against the ECLA system, and the user receives a list of suggested ECLA classes for searching that subject. This does not replace the need to carefully consider which is the best mark, but it does take away some of the effort of learning the system, and gives you more hits.

It is applied back to at least 1920 for some countries and you can use the esp@cenet system to help to discover ECLA marks, and use the classification schedules as a search tool.

Reading a Patent

Finding patents to look at is just the beginning of your search, the next step is trying to understand the way they are set out. To protect their clients Patent Agents have become experts at disguising inventions by developing their own peculiar version of legal and technical English.

For example:

Don't be upset with the use of the word "said" as in "said lever attached to said spring". The word "said" is equivalent to the word "the" and is used after an element of the invention has been mentioned already by the word "a" as in "a spring attached to a pivoting arm, said spring holding said pivoting arm ...". It is best to mentally insert the word "the" whenever you see "said" and of course, never search the word "said."

Patent Styles

Patent claims are written in a very stylised manner. Each claim is one sentence long, which means that each can be a very long run on sentence. One claim in a recent pharmaceutical patent ran six pages long (about 3,500 words). To protect the invention from illegal copies, the claim drafter will broaden the terminology as much as allowable. In addition, the claims are written with the noun first, then the modifiers. So, instead of claiming "a red car," the claim drafter would claim a "vehicle painted the colour red." Thus, when searching patents, note that word order is typically turned around from conventional English, with the subject of the sentence first, followed by the modifiers.

Most patent websites do not allow for searching words in a non-specific order, but further investigation as to the search engine may allow the searching of order-specific phrases. For example, if phrase searching is allowed by the use of quotes, make sure to put the search terms in both the noun-first order and the modifier-first order.

A patent drafter can be their own lexicographer, meaning that they may use industry-specific terms that are not in the common vernacular. For example, what is known as a "submersible pump" in general, can be a "submergible pump" or even a "submercible pump" in the industry. When searching, one has to allow for these spelling variations.

Finally, care should be taken when searching patent assignees or inventors as even the simplest names can be spelled several ways. Abbreviations such as "mfg" or "corp" are found interspersed with the longer spelled out versions of these words. Very few governmental websites apply additional indexing to clean up these spelling variations.