From the Editor
Happy New Year from all of us at Dialog! We’d like to welcome you to 2010 with a special message from Dialog General Manager Suzanne BeDell:

“As we enter 2010, I am sure you are looking forward to an improving economy and to finding new ways to drive innovation and growth for your organization. Here at ProQuest and Dialog, 2010 will be an exciting turning point — the year in which we introduce a new product platform that will serve the broad range of our customer communities.

For Dialog customers, this means the long-awaited unification of the Dialog^® and DataStar^® services. This transformative next generation product will combine Dialog and DataStar databases with sources from the ProQuest full-text collection. The result will be an enhancement of the power of Dialog and DataStar combined with greater ease of use and new tools for extracting answers from search results. We anticipate making the new platform available through a series of releases starting in second quarter 2010. You can count on the Chronolog and other communications to keep you informed as the new product platform develops.”

The new product is in part in response to feedback we have received over the years from you, our customers. To keep that feedback open, we are asking you to please complete a six-question survey to help us understand how we have met your needs in the past and how we can improve your satisfaction going forward.

This issue also highlights our intellectual property collection, including Dialog’s extensive collection of databases for prior art, a new version of Innography integrating trademark data, the Free File for January — European Patents Fulltext — and much more. And, be sure to check new pricing promotions to start the year.

New promotions and pricing options to start 2010

Free searching in selected Cengage files through March 31

Dialog and Cengage are offering free searching in select Cengage files from January 1, 2010, through March 31, 2010. During this time all DialUnits, Connect Time, and Alert Profile charges will be waived to allow customers to search these files and create and run Alerts profiles at no charge. Output pricing such as full formats and Alert prints will be charged at current rates. The included Cengage databases in the promotion are listed in Table 1.

Be sure to take advantage of this opportunity for unlimited searching in a wide range of business information sources!

Dialog and DataStar pricing aligned

As we set the stage for the launch of a next generation product in 2010, we are working to simplify and align transactional pricing across Dialog and DataStar. This includes standardizing Connect Time and Output pricing across the two services and unbundling Alerts prints for most databases on Dialog. (Alerts prints have always been unbundled on DataStar.) Where Dialog Alerts are unbundled, we are lowering the Alert profile charge. Some of these changes are effective January 2010, and others will be introduced in coming months.

We are also working on a new commitment plan option, which will include unlimited searching for the plan period. Watch for more information in the February Chronolog, or ask your account manager for details.

Protect your IP with integrated trademark data on Innography
Innography’s new version release integrates trademark data into its uniquely correlated patent, litigation, financial and other key business information solutions. Use Innography analytics with trademark information on Dialog to map patents to products by using trademarks as a proxy for product and brand names. These correlations allow you to better manage your trademarks, gain additional competitive intelligence, uncover market trends and provide better protection to your organization’s intellectual property.

Trademark Keywords search is now an option from the search drop-down menu. You also have a number of options for field-specific searches, such as grouping trademarks based on International and U.S. patent classification codes (IPC).

Attend our Webinars to learn more about using Dialog trademark searches with Innography and other post-processing enhancements for patents.

DialogClassic Web enhanced
DialogClassic Web now enables users to reconnect to a previous search session. Formerly, if a user accidentally closed the Web browser or accessed another Web site while searching DialogClassic Web, the entire Dialog session was lost. However, the latest DialogClassic Web enables you to reconnect to a previous session. Just return to the logon page and, if a previous session exists, you may log in with the option “Reconnect Previous Session,” which is checked by default.

Meet the Global Customer Support team
One of Dialog’s greatest strengths is our dedication to you, our customers. In 2010 we re-emphasize that support with a newly-organized group—the Global Customer Support team. Read on to find out who makes up the team, the role they play and how their responsibilities continuously evolve to provide even greater service to you.

Q: Explain briefly what you see as the Global Customer Support’s main mission?
A: Our team consists of the field-based Training and Applications Consultants and the phone-based Knowledge Center. Our goal always has been to help our customers use Dialog’s products and content in the best way possible and to answer their business, intellectual property, science and technical questions. In 2009, we will have communicated with more than 30,000 customers — and most of those communications are one-on-one.

Q: Who is on your team?
A: There are 25 individuals on the team throughout North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. We are an experienced group with over 250 years of combined service at Dialog. Among the group are individuals with advanced degrees, including PhDs, JDs, MLSs, MBAs. Our team members also bring experience prior to their roles at Dialog — at laboratories, governmental agencies, management consulting firms, technology companies and, in fact, Dialog’s competitors. Besides English (or its American variant!) some of our team members also speak French, German, Spanish and Italian.

Q: What tasks support your mission?
A: Our job has many categories. We offer content and product training, product and content support, technical assistance, Alert set up and maintenance, and our project bureau has the capacity to conduct searches for customers if there is a need because of illness, leaves or an overabundance of research requests. We work with customers over the phone, in-person or by email, and our training sessions can either be live or via the Web. That training can be a public session, where many different customers are together, or customized for one specific customer’s needs and held at the customer’s site. We also assist in creating subject-specific training materials and aids to facilitate research needs.

In 2010 and beyond, our primary overriding responsibility will be to help our customers transition to Dialog’s next generation platform.

Q. Can you give us a specific example of one of your tasks?
A: One such area would be the Alerts Bureau. Many customers know when we mention Alerts that these are ongoing, recurrent automated searches, executed independent of searcher efforts. The Alerts Bureau is a time-saving resource that puts the power of Knowledge Center specialists to work for you! Our subject experts work with customers to define the specific information need; then we create strategies to push results to users to keep them up to date. Customers short on time use the Alerts Bureau, as do customers researching a less familiar topic. It’s easy to have a member of the Alerts Bureau recommend databases or strategies, or set up or edit an Alert. Just fill out the easy-to-use form located on the Dialog web site to have the Alert set up on Dialog or DataStar.

Alert topics cover all subject areas and can be created in almost any database. For example, an organization might need to stay abreast of new regulations or legislation in the pharmaceutical industry. Or, a company might watch a competing company’s patents to see what new products it is developing. The newswires, trade literature, patents and trademarks on Dialog can help to find this kind of information. You might want to know who is citing your patents or make sure another company is not infringing on one of your patents. Dialog has patent files that cover all regions of the world. These are just a few of the projects the Alerts Bureau gets involved with.

Q: Why is your team’s role so important to Dialog customers? And, what makes your job at Dialog so exciting, especially since you have been with the business for such a long time?
A: Every customer at Dialog has a sales representative, and we like to say they own the relationship with the customer entity and our group is responsible for the relationship with the individual users at that customer entity.

We train the customer’s team on how to use the product and, more importantly, help the customer understand how to apply Dialog’s content to their business needs. We are the ones that answer the calls for help from the users — 24 hours a day, five days a week (at 800-3-Dialog). We also respond to customer’s written inquiries (email to or otherwise) to meet their needs.

What we are especially proud of, and what we really enjoy about our jobs, are the long-term relationships we have built with individual users over the years. Whether they come to one of our Update Forums, attend a session with a Training and Applications Consultant, or hear a familiar and friendly voice on the other end of a help call, Dialog’s customers tell us they feel we have their best interests in mind and appreciate our help. It’s very rewarding.

Watch for interviews with other groups at Dialog in the coming months. View an on-demand version of the interview.

Free File of the Month — European Patents Fulltext
Provided by the European Patent Office (EPO), European Patents Fulltext (File 348) is a collection of more than two million patent documents from individual inventors and companies seeking patent protection published directly by the European Patent Office . Filing a single application in any of three languages—English, French and German—enables patent protection in up to 38 countries. File 348 covers all European patent applications and granted European patents published since the opening of the EPO office in 1978 and bibliographic records for Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications transferred to the EPO. The file is international in scope and is updated weekly.

Patent data provides a wealth of information for many people involved in business, especially corporate decision-makers, investors, managers and innovators working in research and development. European Patents Fulltext can help you to:

• monitor trends in technology that influence your products
• track in which markets your competitors are active
• identify business opportunities such as licensing and investing.

You can also find out what technologies exist and build on them. Legally, you can avoid infringing on others’ patent rights, and if you are a small company, you may secure market share with your patents.

Review the Overview of European Patents Fulltext to learn more about this database that provides comprehensive information about patents filed with the EPO, and sign up for Webinars on January 13 and 14 to learn about File 348 content, highlights of the value-added indexing and features and search tips. Throughout January, explore this file up to $100 for free (either DialUnits or Connect Time). Output and Alerts charges are not included.

 Business & News Content Updates

ICC British Company Financial Datasheets enhanced
ICC British Company Financial Datasheets (File 562) has been enhanced with several new fields, yet the current design of the database remains the same. The changes apply only occur to data updated into the database from October 6, 2009 onward. In addition, ICC will provide this new content as company records are updated. For more information check the Bluesheet. ICC Company Directory (File 561) was already updated. See the Database Changes page for a listing of all changes to files since September 2009.

 SciTech Content Updates

Annual reload of MEDLINE underway
The annual reload of MEDLINE^® on Dialog (Files 154,155) and DataStar (MEDL, MEYY, MEZZ) is underway. MEDLINE is reloaded every year because the National Library of Medicine (NLM) re-indexes relevant documents from the whole database with changed medical terms. The reload began in November when the NLM provided only records not in a “completed” status (without descriptors). From approximately mid-December through January 2010, updates will be reloaded to complete the MEDLINE back file. When the back file is reloaded, descriptors in all records in the MEDLINE databases will match descriptors in the new 2010 version of the thesaurus.

 Intellectual Property Content Updates

Derwent Chemistry Resource (DCR) reaches 1.5 million records
In Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) update 200979, Derwent Chemistry Resource (DCR) reached the milestone of 1.5 million records, meaning you can now search DCR for compounds indexed in more than 1.8 million DWPI records.

DCR (File 355) is the chemical structure companion file to DWPI^SM (Files 351,352/350), which is a comprehensive database of value-added worldwide patent information. DCR captures chemical name and structure details from new compounds in patents, and a new DCR database record is created for each new structure encountered by the expert DWPI editorial analysts. The deep-level DCR indexing is created for each patent with new chemical content with up to 99 compounds per patent indexed.

DCR enables you to retrieve relevant patents in DWPI via a search based on chemical name. This type of search frequently will retrieve relevant patents not found via regular patent search methods (e.g., using keywords or IPC). Each DCR record describes a particular substance, and the DCR identifier allows cross-referencing to the corresponding patent records in DWPI.

A Proximal and a Distal Tip
By Ron Kaminecki, MS, CPL, JD, director, IP segment, US patent attorney

Some time ago, I used to lose a lot of pens, mostly because they were cheap and a multi-pack of a dozen for a small sum meant they were considered disposable. However, I received a present of a nice gold Cross pen, and I learned to respect where I put it and did not ever lose it. I still have it, even though I loaned it to a friend of mine, and although he lost it, we searched everywhere he went until we found it on his black hole of a messy desk. I have probably saved hundreds of dollars in not buying disposable pens, and I also learned some folks are not as concerned about another’s property!

Black Holes on Earth
Searching by words is still the preferred method of narrowing down a retrieval from all records in a huge database like a patent file, but at some point language only goes so far. Thus, enter class codes.

Talking about class codes is usually best done at nighttime because most people start to sleep about then. So, I’d like to keep it short, but point out some tricks to get around sticky problems. In patents, these problems quite often show up when a word is used in a particular context, sometimes called a term of art. Here, a word means something to practitioners in the art that may be at odds with more common usage. Typically, colorful phrases are used to identify concepts in the sciences and engineering. For example, “black holes” usually mean sinks that absorb everything within reach and probably came from astronomy in which collapsed stars turn into black holes, not even letting out light. But, this term has become popular in other areas, and a search for black holes will now include:

• Black hole quenchers — a non-fluorescing dye that eliminates a large part of the spectrum
• Persistent black holes — in magnetic resonance studies of certain brain diseases, a contrast enhancing lesion can become a black hole, but also used for candidate stars that may form black holes
• Black hole router — in computer systems, a device that drops certain transmissions without stating that it did so
• Desk as a black hole — anyone’s desk that is a disaster area (aka a black hole) and you know if you give this person anything (like a pen), you may never see it again.

For each of these areas there may be an appropriate class code, either International or U.S. or ECLA or F-Term, etc. However, if you want to use words as search terms, use broader codes in concert to help give the words the proper meaning. So, for:

• Black hole quenchers use CL=435
• Persistent black holes use CL=514 (medicaments) or CL=435 for the genetic engineering assay version
• Routers use CL=707 (data transmission)
• Messy desks of your friends – don’t give them anything valuable, but CL=345 (Computer Graphics) actually covers “messy desks.”

Claims focus
How can you find these codes? One way is to search the terms in the Claims field (e.g., SELECT BLACK(W)HOLE?/CM) and then RANK the results by class code (RANK CL). Always look up the class code meaning. The easiest way is to pick out the top item of the RANK list and EXIT from RANK.This will save the code as a SearchSave that can be executed in File 124 CLAIMS^®/ REFERENCE. Email for a sample search.

The technique of searching for a specific term in the Claims field is something I do when faced with a search with misleading but useful terms, or when a class code alone is not enough. The Claims field typically has focused terminology, and if a term of art appears in the Claims, it usually means the focus or main intent of the invention contains the term. By RANKing the result of a claims-only search, you usually can find fairly focused items. Lacking a good name for this technique, I refer to it as the Claims Focus as the name is suggestive enough. Please do write it down, but don’t use a disposable pen.

Prior art searching with Dialog
by Jane List, Technical Product Manager for Intellectual Property with degrees in Chemistry, Information Science and a Certificate in Intellectual Property Law

The most common type of patent search undertaken in industry is probably the prior art search. A prior art search aims to uncover material closely related to the proposed application. The concepts to be searched and analyzed will be based on the description of the invention and one or more possible claims.

A good prior art search helps you and your patent agent or patent attorney to prepare the “Background to the Invention” section of the patent specification. This will show the patent examiner where your invention differs from the “state of the art” in your field.

Searching for prior art — PCT guidelines
A thorough prior art search will encompass both patents and non-patent literature (NPL). Indeed, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) provides a minimum set of sources required for patent offices handling Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications. The wise patent searcher needs to cover at least these sources. The journal list (last updated in 2006, and due for an update soon) is available online in the Handbook on Industrial Property Information and Documentation on the WIPO website. All of the sources from the PCT minimum list are available on Dialog. In the future, we aim to make it easier for you to be sure you’re searching the patents and non-patent literature needed for each domain.

The U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) publishes general search guidelines for the prior art search (see Section 904.02), available on the USPTO website, and also provides source lists for each U.S. Classification. Again, all of these sources can be found on Dialog.

Searching for prior art — USPTO guidelines
The USPTO guidelines explicitly stress the importance of searching NPL in fast-moving “arts” where patents do not always represent the latest technology. It takes 18 months for a patent application to be published, and the state-of-the-art in, for instance, computing and telecommunications, may move even faster than that. Therefore, looking at other sources (journals, conferences, open source material, and industry newsletters) may be more important than searching patents.

In some fields, particularly clean technology and engineering, it is often necessary to search older literature. For example, alternative energy sources and surrounding technologies already experienced high periods of activity after World War II and during the 1970s when oil prices were high; so, it is always worth considering older literature when searching these arts.

Records in the Inspec^® database (Files 2,3,4 / INSP, INZZ), which covers more than 4,000 scientific and technical journals and approximately 2,200 conference proceedings, soon will include International Patent Classification (IPC) Core codes. When fully reloaded on Dialog in 2010, searches using the IPC codes will be possible back to 1969.

Other databases to consider for engineering are:

• AeroBase (File 104), which covers hard-to-find grey literature relevant to the aviation industry, including environmental and pollution issues
• Jane’s Defense and Aerospace News/Analysis (File 587)
• ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies and Engineering (File 60) that contains both patents and NPL.

At Dialog, we pride ourselves on the breadth of our scientific and technical literature collection, with more than 200 scientific and technical databases covering everything from food and nutrition to nuclear engineering. With this coverage there’s sure to be valuable data to consider as you prepare for your prior art search.

Throughout 2010, we will be aligning our patent and non-patent literature collections to facilitate prior art searching in each domain. We know you need access to the full text too, not just the abstract, and we are working to make this easier through eLinks and full-text collections from ProQuest.

 Learn about ProQuest

Medical Evidence Matters enhanced with new disease states
Medical Evidence Matters (MEM) on Proquest plans significant expansion of its disease coverage in 2010. In the first phase, a number of modules such as oncology and orthopedics will see the addition of further disease states. For example, the oncology module will expand to include other types of cancer such as stomach, pancreatic and liver cancers, and the orthopedics module will cover osteoarthritis, Paget’s disease and osteoporosis, to name a few. Other modules will add further disease states as the year progresses.

MEM is an evidence-based medicine (EBM) search tool that draws information from hundreds of peer-reviewed journals to help researchers assess the respective outcomes from the range of therapy options for patients with confirmed diagnoses. The database supports the finding of the relevant published and peer-reviewed evidence and the application of that research to individual patients. Results are organized into summary graphs and tables – helping the researcher assess the evidence for clinical effectiveness.

With MEM the searcher can:

• get an instant meta-analysis of all current and historical research with personalized tables, graphs and text
• examine results and perform comparisons at a glance using standardized statistics and outcomes.

As we continue to expand MEM coverage, we want to hear from you on priority modules and disease states to cover. Contact your account representative or the Knowledge Center with your suggestions.