Report:Thomson Innovation/Search History Interface/Preferences
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Preferences
Thomson Innovation's preferences section offers multiple categories, including General, Search, Alerts, Result Set, Document Delivery, Record View, Exports & Reports, and Highlighting. Innovation’s preferences pages are so detailed that there is even a separate help guide for setting preferences. This section will cover the General Preferences, Search, Result Set, Record View, and Highlighting preferences pages.
General Preferences
Under the first option, general preferences, settings can be saved related to login procedures, security and default search pages. The figure and discussion below show the options in detail.
Automatic login: users may turn this setting on if they wish to be automatically logged in whenever they navigate to the Innovation website.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer connection): turning this option on heightens security by encrypting data sent to and from Thomson Reuters' servers. (The downside is that it may also make navigation slower).
Show Retain Search History and Marked List option upon login: When Innovation launches it will at first display a pop-up window asking the user whether to retain the last search history and flagged documents list created during the previous session. So as not to be bothered with this dialog window every time at log-on, if the answer will always be the same, the user can choose to always retain (or always clear) this data from the preferences page.
Emulate Behavior of This Application: This option is specifically for users who have migrated from another Thomson Reuters search tool. The application options are Delphion, MicroPatent, and Aureka. Selecting one of these systems will change the Thomson Innovation interface to behave similarly to that application, including accepting older search syntax from those programs.
Editor's Note:Including a feature such as the "Emulate Behavior of This Application" shows that the developers of Thomson Innovation are particularly sensitive to problems that are often caused by introducing a new search tool on an organizational level. Acceptance of a new resource is often low, and users are often discomforted or dissatisfied by the switch. This feature provides the option for users to transition into using Thomson Innovation slowly by making it more like the former system.
Default Start Page: Once logged in to Innovation, the default display is the standard patent search wizard. From the preferences page, users may choose to start at any one of these potential starting pages:
- Inbox
- Work Files
- Saved Searches & Alerts
- Watched Records
- Citation Maps
- Search Histories
- Charts
- Patent Standard Search
- Patent Number Search
- Search History (seems to be a duplicate of “search histories”, above)
- Marked List
Quick Search Default Type: This option lets users change the function of the Quick Search box that appears at the top of every search page, from a patent text search to a patent number search.
Search Preferences
Under the search preference section, it seems that just about every feature of the search interfaces can be edited from this page. The list is so big that the window must be navigated by a scroll bar, as seen in the figure below.
The salient features of this preferences page are summarized below:
- Select either the fielded patent search, or patent number search, as the default patent search form.
- Activate or deactivate menu toolbars that normally appear on the patent search forms, specifically the Show/Hide Operators, Display and Sort Options, and Query Previewer bars for the Fielded Patent Search Form, or the Display and Sort Options or Specialized Searches bars on the Patent Number Search form.
- Select the collections which should always be selected as defaults from the collections menu.
- Choose the default number of fields to be displayed in the Fielded Patent Search form – a maximum of 5 may be chosen.
- Turn automatic word stemming on or off
- Turn relevancy ranking on or off
- Set the default date range for a date-limited search, and select what the default parameter should be (publication, application, priority or earliest priority date)
- Set the default operator to use between multiple fields in the Fielded Patent Search Form
- Set the default operator to be used when two keywords are typed into the same field and only separated by a space – (choices are ADJ, AND, or OR).
- Set the definition for what should appear in the “Specialized Search” bar when using the patent number search form. Specialized search options are Citation Search, Family Search, or Record Updates (searches for recent legal, family, citation or assignment updates made to the particular patent record).
Result Set Preferences
In the Result Set Preferences section, display, sorting and collapsing options can be changed. These options relate to the Result Set view or hit list view, which is a separate entity from the Record View interface, which has its own preferences menu (discussed in the section below).
From the Result Set Preferences menu, users can:
- Activate or deactivate tools that normally appear in the Patent Result Set page (a.k.a. the hit list display), such as the Refine Search feature, the Result Set toolbar (in other words, the menu bar with save, export, marked list options, etc.), the Filter Results feature, and the Display and Sort Options menu.
- Select the data fields that should be included for each hit in the hit list, which comprises a long list of bibliographic features including abstract, representative drawing, classifications, assignee and inventor information, update information, etc. (For a complete list of the display options see The Hit List, above.)
- Activate or deactivate tool icons that appear for each individual record, including the PDF download icon and the Notes icon.
- Change the Sort By options, and the order in which records should be placed (ascending vs. descending)
- Change the resolution of the patent drawings, from thumbnail or 150-600 dpi. (These different resolution options are offered by the preferences menu, however, the help guide states that “thumbnail” is the only resolution available at this time).
- Change the collapse-by options to INPADOC family, Derwent family, Application Number, or “none.” (See The Hit List for more information.)
- Change the four “Filter Results” fields to different filtering parameters. The list of available parameters includes: Assignee, Inventor, Current IPC Class, Publication Year, Priority Date-Earliest, Publication Date, Application Date, Country Code.
Record View Preferences
The record view preferences relate to which data fields are available when an individual patent is opened in the Record View window.
From the Record View menu, users can:
- Choose whether Highlighting and Images panels will appear automatically when the Record View window is opened.
- Choose bibliographic data, text sections and other special indexing terms which will be displayed in the record view, from the following list of options (the three mandatory fields that cannot be unselected are Title, Patent/Publication Number, and DWPI Title).
Highlighting
The highlighting preferences panel allows users to control where highlighting will appear in Thomson Innovation, to set color preferences, and to define the highlighting panel view (specifically, whether the list of hit terms is displayed by term or by field). The screenshot below shows the options available in the highlighting panel.
Editor's Note:As part of its goal to become the last word in online patent search tools, Innovation offers a vast array of preferences to allow users to customize it according to the varying spectrum of individual needs and demands. Account administrators will appreciate the high degree of control they have over default settings.
