From the Editor
We’re off to a fast and exciting start in 2010, with a new Dialog user panel, additional and enhanced databases, expanded training opportunities and more documentation! As we prepare for the launch of our new technology platform, we are eager to hear from you to help us better understand your information needs. Our new user panel is designed to do just that; read more in this issue about how to register to participate. Also in this issue, find out more about MarketResearch.com, a new database on Dialog, to guide you to important market research information. And, as always, check out the Free File of the Month.

To develop your expertise searching Dialog and DataStar more efficiently and effectively, register for new training classes, and don’t miss the new Quantum² sessions, designed especially for information professionals’ needs. We’re glad to have you with us as we undertake these exciting initiatives in 2010!

Be a part of Dialog’s latest technology development
Our new Dialog technology platform scheduled for rollout later this year will bring our precision searching and broad and deep content collection together with an intuitive interface, creating a product that can be used by everyone in your organization. We invite you to participate in launching this exciting new product, which will bring both Dialog and DataStar together on a single platform.

As you can imagine, your input is essential to our success in creating transformative products that meet your needs and those of your users. Join us as a member of the Dialog user panel and engage in discussions related to development and testing of our products and services. Register and take a moment to log in and familiarize yourself with the site so you can share information. 

You will see we have been using four types of users, or persona, to help us define product requirements. You may find you naturally identify with one of these individuals, or you may feel you are a blend of one or more of these types – please let us know what you think.  You also can use the forum to tell us about specific information challenges you encounter so we can better help solve those problems now and in the future. As with any such activity, not all ideas can actually be acted on, but your feedback will contribute to our understanding and help us to prioritize our development efforts.

We hope the interaction among customers and with Dialog staff this forum affords will also be valuable and interesting for you, as you consider your role in your organization. Our customers are among the most savvy and informed information users in the world, and we hope bringing you all together will stimulate an exchange of ideas that benefits everyone involved. We look forward to your participation and hope, with your help, to better understand the issues you face on the job every day.

Meet the Platform Management team
Launching a new interface and supporting and enhancing current Dialog and DataStar products will keep the Platform Management team busy in 2010 and beyond. Find out who they are, what role they play, and how their responsibilities are evolving to provide you with new and better products.

Q: Explain briefly what you see as Platform Management’s main mission.
A: The team’s main mission is to ensure the portfolio of products and services meet the needs of Dialog’s global customer base. We accomplish this by working very closely with our customers and the various functional areas within Dialog. Over the last year we conducted more than 500 user interviews. We walked customers through a variety of storyboards – a step-by-step depiction of a user workflow, and user interface prototypes – more finished views of the storyboards but with a richer interface design. We then took the feedback from those sessions and began to build lists of requirements that are then submitted to our Technology organization for implementation in our new platform.

We also manage the current DataStar and Dialog platforms, so we drive the implementation of new services on those platforms. Most recently, we implemented the direct export from DataStar to RefWorks.

Q: Who is on your team?
A: The Platform Management team has six members, each with more than 10 years at Dialog. Their educational subject expertise is diverse from history to chemistry to computer science. Members also hold masters’ degrees in biochemistry, computer science, library science and business, as well as a juris doctorate.

• Eddie Watkins leads the group and oversees the existing Dialog and DataStar platforms, while also leading the development of the next generation Dialog platform. During his tenure, he has led numerous successful product launches, including DialogLink 5 and DialogClassic Web.
• Platform Manager Bill Kivett manages the Dialog and DataStar platforms.  He also drives key development projects — most recently he oversaw RefWorks direct export from DataStar 
• John Bloomenthal is the XML product developer who oversees XML services – creation of XML report templates for our products and for custom solutions
• As Manager of Product Lifecycle, John Ward manages the products through their lifecycle.  He also leads the development for our custom solution services
• As User Experience (UX) Specialist, Jamal Cromity is leading the creation of product interfaces that help people use Dialog’s research applications easily and effectively. Jamal also performs user research and analysis and is actively involved as a well-published author, as well as being the 2009 - 2010 President of the North Carolina Special Libraries Association (NCSLA).
• With more than 10 years of experience in Web development, Mark LaTour is the Web content developer who manages the Dialog intranet and key support applications like Dialog KnowledgeBase.

Q: What tasks support your mission?  
A: Each team member has specific responsibilities to support the overall performance of Dialog and DataStar products. For example, they create new products such as the RefWorks integration; upgrade products, including adding File 997 to NewsRoom Plus; and enhance products such as DialogLink 5 and DialogClassic Web. They also create custom solutions at the request of customers and communicate product details to customers, other teams at Dialog and the development organization. In 2010 their main tasks include conducting extensive customer interviews to understand the needs of our customers in the context of our next generation product, as well as documenting these requirements.

Q. Can you give us a specific example of one of your tasks?
A:   A most recent project was to enhance Dialog integration with Innography to allow direct export of patent records to Innography. We have also spent a good deal of time over the last year conducting storyboard and user interface review sessions. We have interviewed more than 400 customers in 12 countries. These sessions have allowed us to understand what our customers would like to see in our future platform.

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: We are constantly thinking about Dialog and DataStar products and how we can enhance or change them to meet the needs of our users and surpass user expectation. Every day offers new experiences and enables us to use our creativity to shape new product offerings. We are driving the requirements for the new platform, so we have direct influence on how the new platform will work. This is exciting because we have the opportunity to work with many customers to create the long-awaited new Dialog platform.

February Free File of the Month — RAPRA Polymer Library
The RAPRA Polymer Library (File 323) is the world's most comprehensive source of published literature on plastics, rubber, polymeric composites and adhesives. RAPRA covers all aspects of the science, technology and business of polymers covered for industries that produce and use them such as automotive, industrial, consumer, medical and transport industries. Subject areas encompass a broad range, including additives and compounding ingredients, adhesives and coatings in science; processing and treatment, properties and testing in technology and markets and industry statistics, legislation and environmental issues in business, to name a few.

The Polymer Library contains a wide variety of sources from more than 500 key journal titles to conference papers, specifications and standards, brochures and books, technical reports, press releases, company literature data sheets and directories. The leading journals in the field are covered, including Plastics and Rubber Weekly, European Plastics News, European Rubber Journal, Modern Plastics International, and Rubber and Plastics News.

Users rely on RAPRA because of its authoritative worldwide sources.

• It only includes items related to polymers so the results are more focused.
• The database contains only published information so the articles have usually been selected by an editor and may be peer-reviewed in contrast to information on the Internet where anyone can post.
• With information sourced from more than 30 countries, you can quickly and easily get the full picture on your topic.
• An experienced team of abstractors produce quality records with thorough and accurate keywords, so your search results will be extensive with minimal false hits.

Learn more about the database in the Overview of RAPRA Polymer Library. Register for Webinars on February 4 and 10 to learn about File 323 content and other highlights of the file. Throughout February, explore this file up to $100 for free (either DialUnits or Connect Time). Output and Alerts charges are not included. Check out the RAPRA Search Tips in this issue!

 Business & News Content Updates

MarketResearch.com (File 771): Your guide to market research reports
Now you can find that market research report you need for competitive analysis, market sizing, forecasts or product trends on Dialog . MarketResearch.com (MRDC) (File 771) provides an index to research written by analysts worldwide. Records containing bibliographic details, descriptions, tables of contents and other information are linked to MarketResearch.com where the full text may be purchased using a credit card (these reports cannot be billed to your Dialog account). 

Each Dialog record relates to a single research report and contains at least one link to the actual content on the MarketResearch.com site. File 771 is updated weekly and contains approximately 130,000 records as of February 2010. The file covers a wide range of topics from health care and pharmaceuticals to computer software and hardware to company and country reports.

 SciTech Content Updates

IPC codes assigned in Inspec
Inspec is now assigning International Patent Classification (IPC) codes to relevant records on Dialog and DataStar. We began adding these to Inspec^® databases (Files 2,3,4 / INSP) in January 2010. IPC codes in Inspec are a valuable tool for the prior art searcher, allowing the ready clustering of relevant non-patent literature within the same familiar code structure used for patents.

New fields added on Dialog include:

Refer to the BASE database guide on DataStar for more information on IPC codes in Inspec – search as BASE-INSP or review the Bluesheet on Dialog

MEDLINE records in Embase
Embase^® has been enhanced by the producer, Elsevier, with indexed MEDLINE^® records drawn from journals which have not previously been available in Embase. The new records began appearing in January, and an archive of more than seven million records will be loaded later in 2010.

This change increases the number of journals covered in Embase from approximately 5,000 to approximately 7,000. In Embase you can use Emtree terms to search across all records. Please note that only 'completed' documents from MEDLINE are currently appearing in Embase. Embase is not including documents with a different status, including records that are described as 'In-process', 'In-data-review', 'Publisher', and 'Pubmed-not-MEDLINE'.

These records will be included in alerts running in Embase (for new records, not for the archive). FAQs will be available very soon, including advice for those wishing to exclude MEDLINE-originated records from Embase alerts.

 Intellectual Property Content Updates

DWPI Manual Codes enhanced
The DWPI manual coding system annual revision has been completed and will be used by the editorial teams to code records appearing in Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) ( File 351,352/350) from DWPI Update 201001. As with previous revisions, coding was updated to:

• reflect changes in technology
• take into account external and internal suggestions for improvements
• make enhancements to the code descriptions and scope notes to improve the consistency of code application by the editorial teams

There will be 795 changes to the codes. Check the coding manuals and reference guides on the DWPI homepage with the updated changes.

In addition to the usual improvements made to the manual code descriptions and scope notes, three thematic indexes to the manuals have been introduced. In response to customer demand the indexes are lists of codes related to a particular technology sector. These technologies were chosen as they spread across many coding sections, and compiling a comprehensive list of relevant codes would have been difficult. Indexes include: Nanotechnology and Green Technology added to both the Electrical Patents Index (EPI) and Chemical Patents Index (CPI) manuals and an index for Genetic Engineering added to the CPI manual. There are currently 23,124 manual codes across the three industry sectors.

Why use manual codes?
Manual codes permit precise retrieval.

• More detail is given via the hierarchical system as the code gets longer (up to seven levels)
• Codes are consistently applied across all the DWPI patent authorities to highlight the novel technical aspects of the invention, as well as the application(s)
• Multiple codes are applied to a single document to cover all relevant aspects
• Codes are updated annually by technology specialists based on trends and customer feedback
• They are designed to produce unique relevant hits when compared with text searching and are more consistently indexed than IPCs
• Codes are intellectually applied, based on the patent content and technology specialist’s knowledge of the area of invention.
  

A Proximal and a Distal Tip
by Ron Kaminecki, MS, CPL, JD, director, IP segment, U.S. patent attorney

The continuing search for patent assignees
Part of my job is to try to find solutions for common questions we receive about patent searching so, I am always on the lookout for new topics. One day while driving through a rural area, I noticed a large farm device that looked like an eighteen-wheeler truck. It had an open trailer with the name “Slinger” on it. So, I thought that this could be used to illustrate how to find the owner of the patent given just the trade name for the device. It took some work, but I did find a way to do so. (And, yes, the device is aptly named as it is a manure spreader.) If you are interested in seeing a short copy of this example, just write to me and I will be happy to send it to you, or join our new user panels. In short, you use the various trademark files to find who owns the trademark, and assuming the same entity owns the patent, you use the name of the trademark owner from the trademark files and search it as the patent assignee in the patent files. Sounds simple, but this took me some time to figure out. And, yes, it does not always work because in many (or even most) cases, the owner of the trademark is a licensee of the patent assignee and there is no other connection between the two.

In the world of searching, there really are no simple solutions. So, while this strategy works, it is not complete. But it does chisel away at a sometimes daunting problem of finding ownership of intellectual property.

Where were you on the night of the assignment?
I like to look at such a challenge as finding a list of suspects. That is, the inventor owns the invention until it is reassigned to the assignee, usually the company that has employed her. The company then may license the invention to others or even sell it outright. The licensees or buyers may then apply for a trademark. For each of these steps there are ways of finding the information:

• Assignments — Inventor to Employer (usually a person assigning rights to a company)

These reassignments can be found in INPADOC/Family and Legal Status (File 345) via several means, though “Assignment of Assignor’s Interest” is the usual vehicle. In Dialog, File 123, you can search for reassignments by EXPANDing RK= (this is the prefix code for assignor’s interests and I encourage you to investigate it because it has a lot of variations) to see the different types of transfers available. All reassignments in this file can be found by SELECTing DT=REASSIGNED to go directly to any kind of such transfer. One of my favorites is a “Nunc Pro Tunc” assignment. And, besides rhyming, this bit of Latin stands for “Now for Then” and is used to change circumstances related to dates.

• Assignments — Company to Company

These reassignments should be easy to find, but quite often they fall into the same “Assignment of Assignor’s Interest” terminology as the inventor to employer issue above. In INPADOC, look for the patent assignee with RA= (for reassignee) prefix code.

However, note that not all reassignments are recorded in patent offices. This quite often arises especially in the United States because of the USPTO’s system of three maintenance payments at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years. That is, if a patent owner reassigns a patent, it is supposed to record this fact to the patent office so the maintenance bill is sent to the new party. But, because the last payment in the United States is due approximately 12 years into a 20-year term, if the patent owner sells the rights to another after the last payment and does not tell the USPTO, then no one outside the two parties involved know about the reassignment. And checking with the USPTO, you will not find the record of this transaction, which while not recorded, is still valid.

And of course, there is the competitive angle. Companies will do whatever they can (legally, of course) to minimize details of any change in ownership. Unfortunately, that minimal information is what the patent offices have to work with, and they can only pass the information onto the various databases. Recall in an earlier column where we pointed out most companies will not file the assignment paperwork until after the application publishes so as to keep the company name out of the public’s eye until the patent actually issues. This, of course, makes it much harder to find who owns an application as the issuance of the patent may be several years after the application is published. And, all of this secrecy just makes finding ownership that much more difficult.

• Assignments — Trademark to Patent

Linking an invention to a patent can be problematic, but outside of finding similar patent assignees, sometimes you can find an appropriate list of suspects by looking at marks with similar class codes. That is, an antihistamine drug under a trademarked name may be linked to a patent under the patent classification codes for antihistamines and searching such can yield associated patents. These results stand a better chance of finding linkages than using assignee names, though neither may be a smoking gun.

So, a search for a particular patent for an antihistamine may begin with

• using the trademark to find the owner (as above)
• then selecting the name of the owner as the patent assignee, again, assuming the owner of the trademark is also the owner of the patent
• then, using International Patent Class Codes or U.S. Patent Class Codes for antihistamines to narrow the retrieval.

If you know or suspect the drug is licensed from another entity, skip the first step. Other data like dates can be introduced or the results sorted in descending order by date. Forward citations figure in quite heavily here as a major patent is more likely cited more often than a minor one.

I have had a lot of luck with this approach using Innography which boils these steps down quite readily. (As you may recall, Dialog has an agreement with Innography and has integrated it into our mix of intellectual property databases for analysis, visualization and collaboration. Watch for a command that will make it easier to export data into Innography.) While this approach does not work every time, it does chisel away a bit more of the patent assignee mysteries.

In Search of Tunes
In my quest for search trademark and patent examples, I did find a lot of heavy metal music was owned by banks! That is, the rights to the music, including trademarks, can be used as collateral for loans. If the band defaults, the lender may end up owning music to bang heads by! And, yes, some musicians have patents. (Eddie Van Halen, US 4,656,917 for a, “Musical Instrument Support”; Prince Rogers Nelson, aka the artist formerly known as Prince (US D349,127), a design patent; the late Michael Jackson US 5,255,452 for a “Method and Means for Creating an Anti-Gravity Illusion”; and Harry Connick Jr., US 6,348,648 for a “System and Method for Coordinating Music Display Among Players in an Orchestra.”)

However, I could not find any patent assignments for any of these; so, don’t expect to see any examples featuring them or Metallica anytime soon. Exit light, enter night.

 DataStar Content Updates

MEDLINE on DataStar reload completed
The reload of the various MEDLINE^®-related databases on DataStar is now complete. The files include:

• MEDLINE (MEDL, MEZZ, ME65)
• MEDLINE In-Process (MEIP)
• MEDLINE – Evidence Based Medicine (MEVB)
• ToxFile (TOXL).

All of these files use the 2010 MeSH^® terms in the updated thesaurus (MVOC). The previous MeSH terms are still available for reference in the new database MV09. There are no changes to the structure of the database.  However, the Comments paragraph (CM) does contain additional information. 

 Learn about ProQuest

ProQuest Pharma reinforces Dialog core biomedical and drug-pipeline research
The ProQuest Pharma Collection, available as part of ProQuest Central or on its own, provides a range of scholarly resources across a wide array of fields specifically relevant to pharmaceutical and biotech researchers. Its user-friendly but powerful platform supports cross-functional information retrieval across an organization and cross-searchability with other ProQuest databases. Dialog searchers will appreciate the ability to reinforce their core biomedical and drug-pipeline research with the full-text comprehensive complementary resources found in the ProQuest Pharma Collection.

• approximately 300 medical full-text journals with the latest information across specialized clinical fields
• expanded opportunities for discovering the most recent medical advances, clinical reports, new studies and innovative therapeutic trends
• approximately 2,600 scholarly full-text journals, offering a huge breadth of references for researchers and medical affairs staff
• includes Medical Evidence Matters, an evidence-based medicine search tool that draws information from hundreds of peer-reviewed journals; subjects covered include medicine, bioscience, psychology and the science disciplines.

ProQuest Pharma also has relevance for all aspects of pharmaceutical discovery and marketing:

• R&D
• Pharmacovigilance
• Medical information
• Clinical development
• Publications planning
• Marketing, business development
• Information services
• Legal

There is also extensive coverage in other subjects of value in the different departments of pharmaceutical or biotech companies advertising and business

• nutrition and dietetics
• trademarks and copyrights
• statistics
• packaging
• and more!

Business journals lead managers to critical data to help them refresh business strategies, follow market trends and improve competitive intelligence. A sampling of journals in the collection includes: Nature, The Lancet, Drug Week, Chemicals & Chemistry Business, Biotech Week, Medical Devices & Surgical Technology Week, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Behavior Research Methods, Pharma Investments, Ventures & Law Weekly, Proteomics Weekly, Health Care Management Science, The Hastings Center Report and Biogeochemistry.