Report:Thomson Innovation/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Images
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Images
Full Document Images and File Histories
Full document images are available from Innovation, and may be downloaded individually or in bulk. In addition, the system offers a file history ordering service. (Access to both of these tools may be controlled via Innovation's access management features, discussed in the Other Features section of this article.) Both PDF document and file history delivery services draw principally from Thomson Reuters' MicroPatent PatentWeb collection, although the system also draws externally from services such as Espacenet to retrieve additional PDFs.[1] To learn more about these features from a functionality standpoint, see the Downloads section of this article.
Innovation draws its document image collection from the earlier MicroPatent collections, and has apparently expanded upon this collection as well. The Thomson Innovation help file states that users can see (by country) which PDFs/images are expected to be available and which are special order by accessing the following coverage charts:[2]
- For Innovation Core and Asian Translated collections, the Collection Coverage & Update schedule shows the earliest date for PDFs for each collection. Each PDF collection will be listed in its own row (i.e. US Granted (PDF)).
- For individual countries found in the Other Authorities collection, go top the last column on the right in the Patent Coverage Chart to see the earliest dates from which PDFs are expected to be available. In the furthest right column of the chart, the column lists the date of the "earliest image/PDF" for that particular authority. The help file defines "Image/PDF" as the actual published patent document. The help file also warns users that image coverage may contain gaps, and images may not be available for all publication types. When "n/a" is listed in the column, the help file states that no specific PDF update dates are shown because PDFs are available through the primary collections.[3]
View the full Patent Collection Coverage Chart here.
Editor's Note:Thomson Innovation does offer a Special Order feature for unavailable documents, at the minimum price of $9.00 per document.[2] However, some of these documents may actually available for free on Espacenet. Users would be wise to check Espacenet for any special order documents before obtaining them through Innovation. The EPO’s BNS patent image collection, available through Espacenet, is probably the most comprehensive global collection in the industry at this time, with over 87 million facsimile images of patent documents in its collection as of 2011.[4]
Patent Drawings
The older MicroPatent data files offered front page drawing images for many of the documents in their collection, and that data is still applicable. See the following chart for all available front-page drawing coverage listed in the Thomson Innovation help file:[4]
Front-Page Drawing Coverage
However, Innovation aims to provide all the patent drawing pages whenever it can, and many full sets of drawing pages are already included in the United States (US) collection. According to Thomson Innovation representatives, full drawing sets are available for at least the US, EP, WO/PCT, DE, GB and JP collections.[1]
One thing that does differentiate Innovation from some competitors is that it does not offer any links to Espacenet drawing mosaics. These drawing mosaics consist of reduced-size drawing pages from patent documents, six to a page, and allow searchers to quickly skim drawing content. They are produced by the European Patent Office (EPO) and available through Espacenet, the EPO’s free online search engine, but some commercial search engines link out to this data as well.
Despite the absence of Espacenet mosaics, however, the Innovation system can show the Derwent World Patent Index representative drawing image in the Hit List, as well as the image panel of the Individual Record View. These representative images, like other DWPI information, have been incorporated into all patent records, not just DWPI results. According to the Thomson help file, the number of images in a patent record view can be one greater than the number shown on the PDF/image because, when a DWPI clip is available, it is shown as the first image in the record view in addition to the other images.[5]
Sources
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 E-mail communication from Thomson Reuters representative. April 2010.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Special Order Patents." Thomson Innovation website, http://www.thomsoninnovation.com/tip-innovation/support/help/special.htm. Accessed September 5, 2012.
- ↑ "Patent Collection Coverage Chart." Thomson Innovation website, http://www.thomsoninnovation.com/tip-innovation/support/help/collections_coverage_chart.htm. Accessed September 4, 2012.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Power Point Presentation. Flatscher, Rony. "The Case of the European Patent Office: Characterizing the Programming Concepts that Allow 'Non-Programmers' to Successfully Write Programs to Refine Patent Document Queries." Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Vienna University of Economics and Business, http://wi.wu.ac.at:8002/rgf/tmp/201102wissijapan/RGF_EPO_ooRexx-201102-v2.pdf. Accessed August 30, 2012.
- ↑ "Patent Record View." Thomson Innovation help file, http://www.thomsoninnovation.com/tip-innovation/support/help/the_patent_record_view.htm. Accessed September 5, 2012.
