From the Editor
Spring has arrived and so have new initiatives from Dialog — Chinese patents, a special Alerts pricing offer, a product enhancement to make Dialog and Innography use more seamless, along with a peek at the new Dialog interface on the User Panel. All this plus a new feature – “Stories from the front lines,” which showcases some of the ways Dialog is helping customers in their daily searching. Read about the pharma searcher who identifies Dialog as “her very good friend,” then send us your battle tales. We would love to hear how Dialog is helping you! Remember to try World News Connection, the free file for April!

Supporting unemployed librarians
Although the economy seems somewhat more stable, many people are still without jobs. Dialog initiated a program at the beginning of the economic downturn in 2008 to help librarians and information professionals who were laid off to use Dialog's powerful resources to conduct their job searches, retain and develop search skills and even provide independent consulting while they look for full employment or start their own information business. Click here to apply.

 

Dialog launches Chinese Patents Fulltext in English
Dialog is launching a never before available collection of Machine Assisted Translation (MAT) Chinese Patents and Utility Models for you to search. With Chinese technologies growing rapidly, and inventors in China required to file a Chinese application first, a real need exists in the West for easier ways to search Chinese patents and utility models. Growth in patents and utility models from Chinese applicants means that many documents are not available in other languages. Now for the first time the new Chinese Patents Fulltext database (File 325) from Scipat enables you to search the full text (claims, description and abstract) of Chinese patents in English (MAT).

During April Dialog will be loading the English-language (MAT) version of Chinese patents, created by Scipat and MatrixWare™. File 325 will contain all Chinese patent applications and utility models from 1985 to date. These documents represent all applications and granted patents and utility models published under the first modern Patent Law of China. The database banner will show the current loading status. When the file is complete, you will be able to set up Alerts to monitor technologies or companies of interest.

Other features of the file include:

• Up-to-date legal status information in human-translated English
• Patent assignees and inventor names in human-translated English
• The drawing from the front page available as part of the record view. Click an elink to download a PDF copy of the original patent and view all drawings.
• Weekly updates – documents updated two weeks post-publication at SIPO (Chinese patent office)

Patent information specialists in industry, patent analysts, patent office searchers and examiners, patent specialists in legal firms and anyone doing business in China will find Chinese Patents Fulltext an important source for:

• prior art searching
• competitive intelligence
• invalidity / clearance searching
• freedom to operate analyses

Patents, written with technical precision but shrouded in legal jargon, can be challenging to understand in any language. The Chinese Patents Fulltext file has been created using state of the art statistical Machine Translation software, with reviews by technical specialists (Human Assistance). The Claims, Description and Abstract are all fully searchable, allowing you to identify relevant documents, explore the legal scope of the patents and uncover technical information. Following initial analysis full human translations may still be required in some cases.

With its timely updating and extensive coverage, Chinese Patents Fulltext (File 325) is your most comprehensive option for Chinese patent searches.

 

SPECIAL LIMTED TIME OFFER! 50% off all Alert profiles for key pharmaceutical industry and drug pipeline news sources
From April 1 through June 30, enjoy a 50% price reduction on all daily, weekly, or monthly alerts profiles for pharmaceutical and related industry news sources on Dialog^® and DataStar^®.

During this period, all Alerts profiles in the pharmaceutical news sources listed below will be half the published price. Take advantage of this great opportunity to assess needs, set up new Alerts and refine or expand existing profiles!   

• Adis Newsletters (File 428, ADPR)
• Prous Science Daily Essentials (File 458,459 PRES)
• NewsRX (File 135; RXNS)
• ESPICOM Pharmaceutical & Medical Device News (File 441, MDNE)
• DIOGENES^® FDA Regulatory Updates (File 158, DIOG)
• Pharmaceutical News Index (PNI^®) (File 42)
• IMS New Product Focus (File 446, IPLL)

For information about the comparative coverage of these and other Dialog and DataStar databases, see the convenient reference chart. If you need assistance in setting up Alert profiles, contact our Global Customer Support team at .

Additionally, the following resource from our “How Do I…?” series covers a key application for accessing the vast amount of pharmaceutical industry trade literature on Dialog and DataStar:

How Do I Find Reports in the Pharmaceutical Trade News of New Drugs Being Developed by a Specific Company?

You won’t want to miss the chance to take advantage of this special offer in April through June!

 

A new Dialog
Take a peek at the new Dialog User Panel
Our mission has always been to help customers find authoritative answers through precision search against the world’s most important content.  In the new Dialog product, we intend to provide you with the content and tools that drive innovation bringing the competitive advantage, sustained growth and profitability to make your organizations market leaders.

• To learn more about the next generation product visit www.dialog.com/feature.
• For a peek at the new interface, join our user panel at userpanel.mydialogconnection.com.

 

New Innography command facilitates post-processing
A new command provides easy access between Dialog search results and Innography analysis. With the new Innography command, you can easily export records to Innography from DialogLink^® 5 and DialogClassic Web™ from all patent files on Dialog. You can also use the Innography command in your Alerts. Just set up the Alert and the resulting records go directly to Innography. Enter your Innography user ID and password and select the folder with the Dialog records to conduct your analysis. It’s that easy!

The command works similarly to the TYPE command. The following variations are supported:

• innography <set number>/<items> <innography_user_name>

Example : innography s1/5,6-10 bajabev@company.com

• innography <set number>/all <innography_user_name>

Example : innography s3/all bajabev@company.com

• innography <innography_user_name>

Example : innography bajabev@company.com

*Note: The Innography user name may be omitted after the first export.

For more information contact the .

 

Dialog plays vital role in your cleantech revolution research
What can you find on Dialog to help you join the cleantech revolution? Dialog’s comprehensive collection of databases will help you — Discover, Validate and Market to promote Innovation throughout your organization. Discover new ways to use cleantech. Validate which companies we’ll see in the next generation of cleantech products. Identify players globally and how they plan to market cleantech products to gain market share and innovate to shape the future of cleantech. Examples of findings in searches from late 2009 and early 2010 illustrate Dialog’s breadth and depth of content.

Discover. Tap into the full range of science — chemistry, biology, energy — to develop environmentally friendly processes and products. Explore events on the frontiers of science by analyzing research issues in databases on Dialog such as: BIOSIS Previews^® (File 5,55) and Environmental Science (File 76). With these databases you can access specialized literature from journals: Environmental Sciences &Technology, Marine Ecology Progress Series, Atmospheric Environment and Water, Air & SoilPollution, to name a few. Identify scientific literature in Dialog OneSearch^® categories, including Environment [ENVIRON], Marine Science [MARINE], Pollution [POLLUT] and Water and Aquatic Sciences [WATER]. Look at titles like “ Efficient waste-to-energy system as a contribution to clean technologies” or “Clean technology for the tapioca starch industry in Thailand” to get a global view. With Dialog you can discover science and energy sources to stay informed about ecological impacts, emissions and biodiversity.

Use Dialog’s comprehensive collection of technical databases — Ei Compendex^® (File 8) and Inspec^® (File 4) among them. For example, finding the following titles could suggest areas of importance in cleantech:   "Convergence of cleantech and nanotech and the benefits to the nanotech sector," "Top 10 ways nanotech will impact cleantech," "Clean technology — Supernatant recirculation after separation of chromium."

Discover new ideas and technologies at conferences or in their proceedings in databases like Inside Conferences (File 65), government-sponsored research in NTIS – National Technical Information Service (File 6) and SciSearch^®: A Cited Reference Science Database (File 34,434). To identify scientists and engineers working in the cleantech arena, use SciSearch to track scientific journal articles and cited references to important papers.

Validate. Dialog’s collection of global patent and trademark databases will help you validate companies and countries interested in cleantech. For example, TRADEMARKSCAN^® – U. S. Federal (File 226) identifies several cleantech trademarks filed with “intent to use,” such as CLEANTECHOC and Cleantech. And, in patent files such as Patents from Derwent World Patents Index (File 351), you can find inventors and patent assignees filing patents related to cleantech activities including solar, agriculture and waste water. Search the Dialog OneSearch category Patents [PATENTS] to identify countries active in cleantech.

Market. Search news, business and market research databases to learn more about companies marketing cleantech products, where they are obtaining funding and more. Searching Dialog Global Reporter (File 20) and Dialog NewsRoom (File 990) retrieved cleantech investment information including trends and indications of cleantech types receiving funds.   In several records from File 990 we can also find companies receiving the largest cleantech funding. Using some of the D&B files – Dun’s Market Identifiers^® (File 516), we can learn more about these companies and by reviewing D&B WorldBase^® – Who Owns Whom (File 522) we can learn if these companies have expanded their operations. We can learn more about cleantech markets by turning to Datamonitor Market Research (File 761), for example, we find the type of growth experts expect and where.

Whether you want to find the top five venture capital cleantech sectors, companies receiving the most funding for cleantech research, countries increasing their spending on cleantech or the top global investors, Dialog news, business and market research databases can provide the facts.

Need more?
Only a few of the many Dialog databases were discussed here. The cleantech revolution will impact most businesses in most sectors from real estate and construction, life sciences and consumer products, to infrastructure, banking and finance. Whether you are a start-up company with a great idea or a large, established corpo­ration looking to leverage current capabilities to provide a cleantech offering, Dialog has the databases you need for your research to encourage innovation throughout your organization.

 

Free File of the Month — World News Connection (WNC)
Companies planning to do business in another country must understand the thinking, culture, laws, customs and outlooks of its people. World News Connection (WNC)^® (File 985) is a unique tool for timely monitoring socioeconomic, political, regulatory and market conditions worldwide. Compiled by intelligence experts from the Open Source Center (OSC), the file contains more than 1,750 non-U.S. sources, such as Xinhua, Middle East News Agency and South Africa Press Association, plus many obscure sources providing local points of view and gray literature not found elsewhere.

Benefits to using WNC are many:

• Comprehensive coverage from newspaper and magazine articles (both hard copy and e-copy), television and radio broadcasts, blogs, conference proceedings, technical reports, including journals and grey literature, which provide technical reports before they go to journals
• OSC expert analyses
• Local-language articles translated into English
• Timely coverage — updated hourly with articles available within 24-72 hours from the time of original publication or broadcast, and sooner if translation is not necessary
• Articles not filtered through Western biases. The articles say what the locals say
• Most articles full text
• 130 of the world's 160 countries covered, including locations other news services don't cover from a local perspective, like Cuba and North Korea.

Learn more about the database in the Overview of World News Connection. Throughout April, explore this file up to $100 for free (either DialUnits or Connect Time). Output and Alerts charges are not included. Attend overview sessions on WNC scheduled on April 7 and 14, and read the WNC Search Tip in this issue.

 

New feature: Stories from the front lines
We have been helping customers with search needs for more than 35 years. Whether you learned Dialog in library school, are new to Dialog at your company or are a long-time user, we want to hear from you. It’s time to showcase our Dialog users and the important research they do every day to help their own customers. Here’s one story from a pharmaceutical librarian.

Dialog covers both my scientific research and marketing needs
“As librarian for a pharmaceutical company in China, I need to do comprehensive chemical literature searches for a group of organic manufacturing experts. My responsibilities also include collecting market information on our products, writing patent reports and analyzing the patents’ legal status. To give an example, I recently searched all the patents about the process for preparation of a crystalline polymorph form of nevirapine (a drug used as part of antiretroviral therapy). Then I also created an Alert with email delivery to help me track the patent information about all of the products continuously.

As another example, I usually use a pipeline database for collecting market information on our products. For an example, I needed information about a specific drug, including the information about the originating company, pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, adverse events and therapeutic trials of this drug. I found this in the database using its special indexing. This helped me master the market information about our product. In a few words, “Dialog is a very good friend in my work.” — ( Linjie, I)

 

 Discover: Scientific, Technical and Medical

Reloads to MEDLINE on Dialog and Embase on DataStar

• MEDLINE on Dialog. In March the 2010 annual reload of MEDLINE^® (Files154/155) was completed. This reload has aligned the new 2010 MeSH thesaurus to the MeSH^® descriptors in all records in the databases.  Review your search strategies to see if they need updating to reflect changes in the MeSH thesaurus. Check the MeSH vocabulary changes for 2010.

• Embase on DataStar. The Embase^® database (EMED) has been reloaded with 2010 Emtree terms. These terms are available in the updated thesaurus (EVOC). The new EV09 database contains Emtree 2009 terms for reference. Please refer to the BASE document (BASE-EMED) for details of the 2010 reload.

• MEDLINE backfile added to Embase on DataStar. The backfile of unique-MEDLINE data has been added to Embase on DataStar along with daily updates containing these MEDLINE records since January of this year. With the inclusion of the backfile the overall size of Embase has increased by more than 8 million records — from 15.4 million to 23.8 million records.

 

 Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

Error correction in original documents adds value in Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI)
In 2009 over 3.13 million patents were loaded into DWPI, which is a 14.5% increase from the previous year. Processing this volume of data is a huge task, particularly as the original patent data can contain errors in the bibliographic data, which could impact the accuracy in searching.

At Thomson Reuters, the publisher of DWPI, the DWPI production teams use both programmatic rules and human endeavor to identify and correct as many of these errors as possible, to ensure the accuracy of key value-add elements such as the DWPI patent family and Patent Assignee codes, and also improve searching through the addition of International Patent Classification codes (IPCs).

Each week data from the various patent offices is loaded (receipted) into the DWPI production system and conversion/validation programs are run to standardize all of the bibliographic data fields into a standard DWPI format. Through this process records with errors or missing data are identified and routed to experts in the production team to be manually corrected. Typical errors include incorrect priority or application numbers, wrong patent assignee names, or missing data such as the IPCs.

The chart shows the percentage split of corrections this year to-date, across a range of individual patenting authorities, focusing on the following bibliographic fields — IPC, priority data, application data and patentee names.

In the first two months of this year the DWPI production teams made corrections to 6,198 records with incorrect or missing priority information, and have manually applied IPC codes to 450 PCT records initially published without any classification. Corrections to the priority data improve the accuracy of the DWPI patent family, as this is a key data element in bringing together patents relating to the same invention.

Here is an example of an incorrectly spelled patent assignee name on a U.S. Patent application. The company name was manually corrected in the DWPI record, and the relevant DWPI Patent Assignee code was applied.

Correcting errors in the original patent content is a key aspect of the DWPI value add, providing searchers with the most comprehensive and accurate value added patent content in one file — Derwent World Patents Index.

 

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

Sneaks, creeps and ownership searching

“Can you find all the patents for this company?” is a frequently requested patent search. As much as I hate answering a question with another question, this one begs more information and sometimes I would find myself too afraid to ask.

I was once asked by a principal in a medium-sized company how to find all patents assigned to the company’s scientists that weren’t owned by the company. When I asked about this search, I was told there was concern some of the scientists working at the company were patenting on their own! I felt sneaky doing so, but this is a search to ensure the inventors were living up to their contracts. Gladly, I didn’t find anyone filing patent applications outside the company, but I could envisage someone taking it a step further and setting up a periodic Alert on its inventors’ filings to ensure future compliance! At least an Alert arriving every once in a while keeps the creepiness out of doing a search like this on demand.

I spend a lot of my time looking for background on a company’s intellectual property, and it looks like there is no paucity of holes in which to hide a patent or a trademark. A simple search for who owns what can be similarly misleading. For example, how about patents assigned to the company but later sold? What about patents owned by the president of the company but not assigned to the company? Are they her private property or is there some obligation to the shareholders? And, what about the company itself — is it affiliated with other companies that can be used to hide property?

Calling all resources
Patent databases do not have much company background; so, consider checking other sources. Dialog has a number of business information files from Dun and Bradstreet, Kompass International, Disclosure and others.

Two key pieces of information can result from these databases — the names of company affiliates and also those of officers/directors. In the case of smaller or startup companies, quite often an entrepreneur inventor gets a patent and then monetizes it by forming a company. Whether or not this inventor reassigns the patent to the company is a personal decision, but without the patent’s technology the new company may not exist. So, technically, the company does not own the patent, but it is an important part of the company’s business, and an answer to the search at the beginning of this column would not be complete without some investigation into what properties the principals of the company own, in addition to what is in the company’s name.

For example, a quick look at the various databases from Kompass International (Kompass Western Europe (File 590), Kompass Middle East/Africa/Mediterranean (File 585), etc.) yields names of directors for many companies. I recall checking the directors of a company for inventorship and found at least one who had multiple patents, some of which were an important part of the company’s product line. However, there was no document that reassigned the rights from the inventor to the company (check the patent number as PN= in INPADOC/Family and Legal Status (File 345) to see the assignment information). So, while this did not conform to the exact answer of the question above, it does deserve a separate paragraph. Indeed, I have since adopted this method of checking other databases whenever looking for patent ownership.

Another item to consider is subsidiaries and parent companies. A look at, for example, Disclosure (File 101) shows company subsidiaries. A simple search would be to EXPAND CO=HONEYWELL, SELECT the appropriate items and TYPE out the subsidiaries (TYPE S1/SB/1) would generate a list of companies also owned by Honeywell, including AlliedSignal Holdings BV (Netherlands), Novar Corporation, Trend Control Systems (UK), and Prestone Products Corp. Again, these subsidiaries would be a separate paragraph, followed by research in, say, INPADOC (File 345) to see if any patents originally assigned to these companies were reassigned to the parent or might be used by the parent as products. The patent portfolios of the parents/subsidiaries may be separate but the different companies may be sharing resources as a sort of internal license or such.

Once you have the names of the directors, it is a simple matter to search all the names at once and then NOT out the company name in the assignee field to find patents assigned to the directors but not to the company. (e.g., SELECT AU=(lugosi b? or karloff b?) NOT PA=universal pictures?). This is the sneaky search I did for the company owner who wanted me to check on his employees. So, a simple search request for patents for a company may have a lot of additional paragraphs.

This is creepy. No, it’s technology
The person who asked me to spy on his employees also asked me to run a quick search on visitors. He took a lot of pride in knowing most people in the field, so he asked the front desk to tell him the names of people who have just arrived and if there was someone he didn’t know, he would ask me to do a quick search on that person. I am sure that during the course of his meeting he would say something like, “You know, I saw that your doctoral dissertation was on….” Maybe I should have felt creepy after all.

 

 Market: Business & News Content Updates

New and enhanced D&B WorldBase databases
With the launch of D&B WorldBase^® – U.S. (File 517) and enhancements to International (File 518), Canada (File 520), Europe (File 521) and Who Owns Whom (File 522), Dun & Bradstreet Information Services has more than doubled its company coverage to become the most comprehensive business database.

File 517 includes nearly 50 million U.S. companies, more than doubling the current coverage found in D&B Dun’s Market Identifiers (File 516). Files 518 and 521, containing family affiliations, executives and basic financials, include nearly 95 million international companies, almost doubling current coverage. All databases are updated with quarterly reloads. Note: no current links to premium pre-formatted reports are available.

While features such as /ULTIMATE, to LIMIT retrieval to the ultimate parent record, and REPORT remain, exciting new features have been loaded into the databases. These features include additional terms on the SF= field, such as MARKETABLE — complete records with all required fields, ACTIVE — recently confirmed as active and LINKED — records with linkage to their corporate families. Review the March Chronolog article and individual Bluesheets for more details.