Full text searching and citation searching
Participants explore the historical development, legal context and practical use of patent citations, including backward and forward citation strategies, relevance indicators, family complexities and database-specific variations. The course also analyses how citation data is generated, published and extracted, and how biases or procedural differences between patent offices influence retrieval outcomes.
In parallel, the course addresses the methodological challenges of full-text searching, including precision versus recall, multilingual retrieval, machine translation, numeric and non-textual disclosures, and the interpretation of claims. Emphasis is placed on understanding database structures and publication practices in order to apply full-text sources appropriately in patentability, validity, FTO and state-of-the-art searches.
The overall aim is to strengthen analytical competence and critical judgement in the professional use of patent information systems.
Target Audience
This module is designed for patent information specialists with one year or less of experience in conducting novelty or patentability searches. It is particularly suited for individuals who have recently entered the profession.
Content
This BPIC course covers the following topics (1 session):
Full Text Search
- Brief history of online search
- Electronic full text search
- Advantages and disadvantages
- Challenge No. 1 - Noise
- Challenge No. 2 - Comprehensive retrieval
- Challenge No. 3 - Analysing the text
- Challenge No.4 - Focussing on the claims
- Full Text Content
Citation Search
- Brief history of citations in law, science and technology
- Fundamental differences between journal citations and patent search reports
- Applicant citations vs. official search reports; motivation and consequences for search
- Backward and forward citation – what can and cannot be found.
- Citations for large-scale statistical studies
- Patent families; document-document vs. family-family citations
- Reviewing assumptions about database content and their impact on retrieval
- Extracting and collating citation data into specialist databases
Study Load
Module 1,2 and 3 are concluded with a written exam (2.5 hrs)
Preparation
Students should know the information sources that are available to them, which enable searching by IPC and/or CPC to be carried out. This should include any sources which are available but which they have not yet used in their work. For those students which have already included classification in their search strategies, it would be helpful to be able to describe any specific difficulties and/or advantages which they have experienced.