Report:TotalPatent/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Comprehensive Coverage Table Introduction
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Comprehensive Coverage Table Introduction
The tables on the following page contains detailed coverage information for the 90+ patenting authorities covered in TotalPatent, whether the coverage is full text, partial text, or bibliographic. The tables contain the earliest date of coverage for each document type (for bibliographic/abstract coverage and full-text/machine translated/PDF coverage, when available). If the patent issuing authority is no longer active (e.g. the German Democratic Republic (DD)) or is numerous years out of date, then the latest year of coverage is given in the tables. TotalPatent's coverage information does contain information about coverage of utility models.
Editor's Note:The following authorities are listed under the available "Bibliographic and Abstract" authorities in the TotalPatent search forms, but they are not listed in the coverage table: Brunei Darussalam (BN), Belarus (BY), Kazakhstan (KZ), Lebanon (LB), Thailand (TH), and Uzbekistan (UZ). Test searches indicate that these collections include no documents. It is possible that these authorities are included on the search forms because they are collections that will be added to TotalPatent in the near future.
In contrast, Georgia (GE) is listed in the coverage table, but the authority is not listed on the TotalPatent search forms. It is unclear why this authority is not provided as an option on the search forms.
Editor's Note:TotalPatent offers some unique bibliographic coverage. Although the EPO’s INPADOC/DOCDB bibliographic patent family database is a source of data for the system, the TotalPatent collection appears to have added expanded coverage (based on additional content in TotalPatent identified through test searches for content before the earliest and and after the latest dates of coverage in INPADOC for patent applications and granted patents) for the following authorities: Argentina (AR), Australia (AU), Bulgaria (BG), Bolivia (BO), Brazil (BR), Canada (CA), China (CN), Chile (CL), Colombia (CO), Costa Rica (CR), Czechoslovakia (CS), Cuba (CU), Cyprus (CY), Czech Republic (CZ), East Germany (DD), Germany (DE), Denmark (DK), Ecuador (EC), European Patent Office (EP), Spain (ES), Finland (FI), France (FR), Greece (GR), Honk Kong (HK), Honduras (HN), Indonesia (ID), Ireland (IE), Israel (IL), India (IN), Iceland (IS), Japan (JP), Korea (KR), Lithuania (LT), Latvia (LV), Morocco (MA), Monaco (MC), Mexico (MX), Malaysia (MY), Nicaragua (NI), Netherlands (NL), Norway (NO), OAPI (OA), Panama (PA), Peru (PE), Paraguay (PY), Russia (RU), Slovakia (SK), USSR (SU), El Salvador (SV), Turkey (TR), Trinidad and Tobago (TT), Ukraine (UA), USA (US), Uruguay (UY), and Venezuela (VE).[1] It should be noted that although VE is not listed in INPADOC coverage and is listed in the TotalPatent coverage chart and as an option on the TotalPatent search forms, a test search for VE documents produced zero results.
These additional collections are probably of limited use in prior art searching, since most of these additional records contain bare-bones data and no English-language title. Some of the records will include inventor and applicant data, which would makes these resources valuable in, for example, projects scrutinizing the international patent filing behavior of a particular entity.
TotalPatent recently added full-text granted patents from the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (formerly the British Patent Office) from 1982 to the present.[2] In fact, TotalPatent states that it is the only data provider to offer access to full text and PDF versions of these New Series pre-2002 GB granted documents.[3]
Overall, TotalPatent is the provider of the largest collection of full text data in the industry, and probably hosts the most comprehensive collection of bibliographic records. Many of these expanded collections are from Central and South American countries, so TotalPatent is stronger than many providers when it comes to hosting collections in those regions, although the national patent offices and sources such as Latipat might offer some of the same collections. It is worth noting that while the DOCDB bibliographic product from the EPO now covers some of these collections, TotalPatent's coverage appears more extensive when the date ranges covered by the two products are compared. This type of comparison can be misleading, however, because collections are not always complete back to the earliest document in the collection, and may contain large gaps.
TotalPatent is beginning to catch up to competitors such as Thomson Innovation and PatBase, providers which have invested resources into producing and loading full text records in Asian languages and producing English machine translations of those records. TotalPatent currently has full-text coverage of a number of Asian patent authorities, including Japan (with machine translations), China (with machine translations), Korea (with machine translations), and India.[4]
TotalPatent contains full text Japanese patent coverage, and the full non-Latin text for this collection now appears to be searchable as of May 2012 (non-Latin text for Korean and Chinese full-text documents also appears to be searchable).
Editor's Note:Users should be wary about the smaller countries listed here; many of these collections are only partial collections. For example, the Mongolia (MN) and Malta (MT) collections are only covered through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Please check the coverage information for the system before assuming that a search in one of these collections is complete. TotalPatent still represents one of the best collections of worldwide patent information available, so this warning should not be interpreted as a negative reflection on the system’s coverage as a whole; the EPO’s Espacenet database suffers from similar data collection gaps, and the EPO’s data is a source for TotalPatent’s bibliographic coverage.
Editor's Note:According to TotalPatent representatives, "Machine Translation" does not guarantee any specific level of data since the level of data varies between bibliographic information, abstracts, and full text. In the following comprehensive coverage table, it appears that machine translations are only included with full-text collections, so it may be assumed that most machine translations include full text of the document.
The bottom line is that while TotalPatent has great coverage (in some cases unparalleled), users need to be careful about testing and interpreting the nuances of the coverage information. One notable example of nuance is that only FI (Finnish) documents published in Swedish are currently translated into English Machine Translations, since full text data is not currently produced using a Finnish/English Machine Translation language pair. TotalPatent representatives have been more than helpful in understanding the coverage information in this regard.
The following information was provided by a TotalPatent representative and is current as of April 2012.[5] View the most current coverage information here.
Please note that gaps in coverage may exist in any collection due to a number of factors, such as missing documents, scanning errors, OCR errors, even failure of national and regional patent offices to report data. No data source can be considered 100% complete, and searchers should consult as many unique data sources as possible. See the following articles for a discussion of unique worldwide bibliographic and family data collections, such as INPADOC, the Derwent World Patents Index, and CAplus.
Sources
- ↑ Readers should note that the European Patent Office added collections to INPADOC/DOCDB for Costa Rica (CR), Peru (PE), El Salvador (SV), Ecuador (EC), Chile (CL), Nicaragua (NI) and Panama (PA), Uruguay (UY), Colombia (CO), Dominican Republic (DO), and Guatemala (GT) since 2008, so these collections are no longer totally unique to TotalPatent. However, TotalPatent's stated earliest dates of coverage for some of these collections surpass INPADOC/DOCDB coverage.
- ↑ "Great Britain Patent Source Information." LexisNexis website, http://help.lexisnexis.com/tabula-rasa/totalpatent/patentsourcetips_gb-field?lbu=US&locale=en_US&audience=online. Accessed May 2, 2012.
- ↑ "TotalPatent™." LexisNexis website, http://corporate.lexisnexis.com/totalpatent/?section=FAQ. Accessed May 2, 2012.
- ↑ Authority Coverage Information." LexisNexis website, http://help.lexisnexis.com/tabula-rasa/totalpatent/coverage_ref-reference?lbu=US&locale=en_US&audience=online. Accessed April 26, 2012.
- ↑ "TotalPatent Content Overview." Coverage table obtained from TotalPatent Representative via email. Accessed May 15, 2012.
