Report:PatAnalyst/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Full Text Coverage/United States (US)
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United States
For dates of coverage, please see the Data Coverage Summary section.
The United States (US) collection as part of UNIPAT includes plant and design patents, reissues, and Statutory Invention Registrations. Current classification information is updated for old patent documents.
Routine searching of the US classification at the time of testing found many absent full text records for granted patents, such as US 6,800,000. These documents do not have full text data in PatAnalyst because they are not the first publication (PatAnalyst appears to prioritize coverage of first publications over grants). To find the first publication (often the published application) corresponding to these granted patent document numbers, users must use the /pnfp field operator instead of the system's /pn operator. Once found, the full text of the first publication can then be used to determine the granted document's potential content. In addition, although full text records for many granted patents are not contained in the system, users can access their patent families using this related first publication, and may also accesses the granted patent’s full document image (when coverage exists).
A test of 19th century US patent documents discovered that the PatAnalyst claims of bibliographic coverage dating back to 1846 is incomplete. Two test documents showed no other bibliographic information besides the patent number. PatAnalyst representatives confirmed that this incomplete bibliographic information is likely due to missing information in the files provided directly from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Other systems using this data would likely suffer the same problems, but this is still important to keep in mind.
Editor's Note:The lack of coverage for all granted patents is a big negative. The missing granted documents, while not first publications, are vital to searchers performing infringement or other claims-related cases. When the final granted patent is not available, searchers cannot identify any changes that may have been made to the claims during prosecution. The fact that users must use a separate field operator to locate the first publication related to the missing document is confusing and not explained well in the user manual. This also creates a poor workflow situation wherein the user must rely on a second tool in order to access necessary granted patent information.
Another important thing to note about document numbers in PatAnalyst is that the format of the patent number entered must match the format specified by PatAnalyst. This means that many common formats of patent numbers will return zero hits and leave the searcher confused. One example of this is that US reissued patents must be suffixed with the E kind code or they will not return a hit. Similarly, any patent document number containing commas or slashes will not be accepted.
