PatSnap
From Intellogist
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PatSnap is a patent search system that offers for-free and for-pay levels of access. Free access limits users to the United States (US), European Patent Office (EP), and Patent Cooperation Treaty (WO/PCT) collections, and does not offer any analytic features. The following information in this community report relates to the for-pay level of access.
Contents |
Data Coverage
PatSnap's full text patent collections include:[1]
- United States - Issued & Applications (1876 – current)
- European Patent Office - Issued & Applications (1976 – current)
- PCT/WIPO (1976 – current)
- China Patent Abstracts (1980 – current)
- Japan Patent Abstracts (1976 – current)
- Korea Patent Abstracts (1983 – current)
- Norway Patent Abstracts (2001 – 2009)
These collections include US Design Patents, Chinese Design Patents, Chinese Inventions, and Chinese Utility Models according to the Advanced Search form. It is notable that the US full text collection predates USPTO coverage due to PatSnap Optical Character Recognition (OCR) efforts.
Search Forms
PatSnap users can choose from the search bar at the top of the interface or the Field, Command, Bulk Download, or Citation Analysis search forms at the bottom. Field and Command Search allows users to search within the following fields:
| Patent Number | Specification | Backward Citation Number |
| Application Number | US Classification | Forward Citation Number |
| Application Date | International Classification | Forward Citation |
| Issued Date | Inventor Name | Backward Citation |
| Publication Date | Inventor Address | Primary Examiner |
| Patent Title | Assignee Name | Assistant Examiner |
| Abstract | Assignee Address | Priority Date |
| Claims |
Search Operators
Boolean operators are available in PatSnap. Proximity operators, stemming, and truncation (wildcard) operators are not supported.
Viewing Results
The Hit List
The hit list provides excerpts with highlighted keywords and representative or front page images. A search filter is available on the sidebar of the hit list, which can be manipulated to narrow results by document types, inventors, assignees, classifications, and filing date. The thumbnails of the representative or front page images can be magnified simply by mousing over said image.
The "Flip-it" view is a viewing method that allows users to page through results with keyboard shortcuts in a linear-reference view fashion.
The thumbnail view displays representative or front page images of each patent. Mousing over each image will temporarily exhibit the patent number, title, assignee, inventor, class, filing date, and issue date as well as a link to download a PDF of the patent
Also available from the hit list is the "More Like This" feature which generates another hit list of "similar" patents. The method for this search generation is unknown, but the system runs the "PNFULL" search command on the user-selected patent. More info about this feature can be found on the PatSnap Blog[2]
Individual Record View
Several views are available including summary, full text, and dual view (which displays the PDF of the patent document next to the full text). No keyword highlighting is available. Hyperlinks are present for available citations and classification codes (which launch a new search instead of linking to the definition).
Importing, Exporting, and Downloading Patent Data
Importing
Document numbers may be imported into the service via a number wizard interface. The screenshot below shows the interface.
Exporting
Subscribers have the option to export patent bibliographic data into XLS, CSV, RTF, or XML format. The available fields for export seem to be comparable to those offered by commercial search services. Users can change the order in which the exported data fields will appear.
The exporting service contains two options: basic bibliographic exporting, and advanced bibliographic exporting. The basic page is where most of the bibliographic data fields can be chosen for export. The advanced page allows users to choose one additional "advanced" field for data export, from the following list of options:
Inventor Address
Assignee Address
Non-patent references
Backward Citation
Forward Citation
Export function supports up to 8,000 documents per export.
Downloads
Bulk downloading is available for up to 1000 patent documents at a time.
Alerts
Alerts are available via RSS feed or e-mail. The e-mail service seems to generate e-mails whenever any new patent meeting the search criteria is published.[1]
History
PatSnap records all user actions and logs them in a timestamped list. There is no way to view a "search string only" history.
Analysis
PatSnap offers "patent analysis" in a number of different ways including:
- Statistical analysis on fields such as inventor, assignee, classification, and date
- "Technology Concept" - a type of keyword analysis for commonly found phrases
- Geographic map using Google Maps data
- Citation tree
Sources
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 http://www.patsnap.com/faq
- ↑ "PatSnap New Look and More Features!" May 29, 2010. The PatSnap Blog, http://blog.patsnap.com/?p=153. Accessed on June 08, 2010.
