From the Editor
Dialog starts June off with a bang! In North America we're anticipating the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference June 13-16, where we'll be participating in the many ProQuest- and Dialog-sponsored events and speaking presentations — and hopefully seeing many of you! At SLA, you'll have the opportunity to learn more about the new Dialog/DataStar platform, during "The New Dialog" part of the SLA Strategic Technology Alliance Series. Be sure to visit us at the ProQuest/Dialog booth, #703.

In Europe, we hope to see you at the Dialog Forum in Paris on June 10. Register to attend this half-day event for an introduction to release 1 of our new product with a focus on scientific discovery. Learn search tips and techniques and much more.

Also in this issue take advantage of the discounts on Alerts in pharmaceutical industry and drug pipeline news sources and Professional ABI/INFORM Complete™ for Dialog customers. Read articles from our experts, and, of course, try Dialog Global Reporter, the free file for June.

Join us at SLA 2010!
As a top sponsor and conference partner of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) for 2010, Dialog and ProQuest offer many opportunities for networking, training and learning more about Dialog, DataStar and ProQuest. Check your program for event times and locations at the SLA 2010 Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 13-16, 2010.

Where you can find Dialog and ProQuest at SLA
Be sure to attend one or all of the Dialog/ProQuest-sponsored SLA activities or speaking events:

• Champagne and special awards reception honoring the Roger K. Summit Scholarship recipient, InfoStars and Australia & New Zealand Chapter Information Professional of the Year Awards on Sunday afternoon, June 6, sponsored by ProQuest and Dialog
• Opening General Session and Awards Presentation with Suzanne BeDell presenting the SLA Member Achievement award
• Rising Star and SLA Fellows Roundtable, with Libby Trudell on panel Monday morning
• Being Nimble and Thinking On Your Feet, with Bill Wickham on panel Monday afternoon
• Hot Topic: "Does Taxonomy Matter in a New World of Search and Discovery?" Tuesday morning. Speaker: Suzanne BeDell
• SLA Strategic Technology Alliance Series: "The New Dialog" Tuesday afternoon. Speaker: Lynn Christie

• Closing General Session: "The Big Switch," sponsored by ProQuest and Dialog.

Also, mark your calendar for some of the more than 20 ProQuest- and Dialog-sponsored division events, and drop by the Dialog-ProQuest booth #703. We look forward to seeing you!

SPECIAL LIMITED TIME OFFER! 50% off all Alert profiles for key pharmaceutical industry and drug pipeline news sources
You still have until June 30 to enjoy a 50% discount on all daily, weekly or monthly Alerts profiles for pharmaceutical and related industry news sources on Dialog^® and DataStar^®. Take advantage of this great opportunity to assess needs, set up new Alerts and refine or expand existing profiles!

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

If you need assistance in setting up Alert profiles, contact our team. You won't want to miss the chance to take advantage of this special offer through June!

Free File of the Month — Dialog Global Reporter
Do you need to investigate economic climates, track competitor moves, identify industry developments or monitor new products—just for starters? Then you should be searching Dialog Global Reporter (File 20), the Free File of the Month for June. A comprehensive global news source, File 20 covers the leading newspapers, business magazines and newswires from all regions of the world, including emerging markets.

Containing more than 63 million records, Dialog Global Reporter shows its diversity — from marketing and banking to the European Union to aerospace and defense, engineering and automotive to biotech, retailing and computers, to name just a few. This English-language database contains full-text articles for a majority of the English-language sources. Abstracts are provided for non-English articles.

Some contributors of premier sources include Chemical Business NewsBase (CBNB), and key international newspapers (United Kingdom: The Guardian, The Independent and The Observer, elsewhere, e.g. India Today, China Post, Japan Corporate News).

Using Dialog Global Reporter
A few titles and sources illustrate the diversity of content a pharmaceutical searcher, for example, could find in Dialog Global Reporter:

• "Merck opens second research center" from the Korea Times
• "Authority sets aside patent, gives hope to patient groups" from the Times of India
• "Blockbuster drug under scrutiny" from a company report in Chemical Business NewsBase
• "India's Glenmark Pharma settles patent litigation with Merck" from Asia Pulse
• Q1 2010 Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Earnings Conference Call — Webcast — Final from Fair Disclosure Wire
• "Swiss co Roche loses patent on anti-viral drug Valcyte" from Economic Times
  

Learn more about the database in the Overview of Dialog Global Reporter. Throughout June, explore this file up to $100 for free (either DialUnits or Connect Time). Output and Alerts charges are not included. On June 3 and 9, attend overview sessions on "Finding Worldwide Business Intelligence and News on Dialog Featuring Dialog Global Reporter (File 20)."

 Remember when...

Dialog introduces the RANK command
In February 1993, Dialog introduced the RANK command. Why is this important, you may ask? RANK acts as an analytical tool providing the ability to perform trend or statistical analysis on an existing search set of Dialog records. This simple yet powerful command extracts terms from a specified field (e.g., patent assignee, sales data) and lists the records in the set in ranked order, with the most highly posted record appearing first. RANK was also available when searching multiple databases in OneSearch^®—an exclusive with Dialog!

Dialog users welcomed this command for competitive, market and patent analysis, locating experts and much more. The possibilities appeared endless: finding companies holding the most patents for hair-coloring products, identifying a company's R&D efforts, locating the most frequently cited author in a subject or finding additional terms for a search strategy.

Dialog has been a leader in innovation throughout its history. Seventeen years ago, well before the Internet was a household word, Dialog was creating powerful search innovations. Today, we continue to offer innovative new services—watch for the new Dialog platform coming soon.

 Discover: Scientific, Technical and Medical

IPC codes in Inspec on Dialog
Inspec^®, the Database for Physics, Electronics, and Computing (Files 2, 3, 4) from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, will be reloaded and available to Dialog customers this month.  The reload will include the following enhancements:

• International patent classification (IPC) codes applied across the backfile.
  IPC codes will be applied across the backfile (1969 to present). These codes have been added to new documents from January 1, 2010, and will now be extended back into the archive.
  
  Inspec is mapping its own indexing schemes to the WIPO IPC scheme enabling them to assign IPC codes to relevant records. Initial trials indicate about 75% of new Inspec records will contain IPC codes, and the average record with these codes will have two assigned to it.

• Affiliations
  Where applicable, an author will be linked with more than one affiliation. Previously, only one affiliation per author was given.

The importance of IPC codes for prior art
by Ron Rodrigues, MLS, senior content specialist

The International Patent Classification, Edition 8 (IPC8), is a classification system created and published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The IPC8 is used by just about all patent databases. However, not many non-patent databases contain IPC8s. Several Dialog non-patent technical literature databases do contain IPC8s, mainly for patent records:

• Inspec^® (File 2)
• TULSA™ (Petroleum Abstracts) (File 87)
• Energy Science and Technology (File 103)
• PASCAL (File 144)
• AGRIS (File 203)
• RAPRA Polymer Library (File 323)
• CA SEARCH^®: Chemical Abstracts^® (File 399)

Inspec (File 2) will soon have IPC8 codes added to 75% of its more than nine million records. Read the article on IPC codes in Inspec in this issue, and enter HELP NEWS 2 online for more details.

IPC8s provide a common thread between patent and non-patent technical literature (NPL) databases. Databases like Inspec make it easy to gather records with the same IPC8 classification for any patent of interest. Furthermore, you can limit the records to those published prior to a patent's priority date. The implementation of IPC codes will be 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.

Here's how
Use this technique in the following databases to locate the NPL published prior to patent US 6913722b, which has a priority date of 1999-06-01.

b 2,87,103,144,203,323,399 

E IC=B41J

S E3 

RD

S S2 AND PY=<1999

You can also select the RANK numbers for more focused topics covered by the IPC8 category for inkjet printers.

Other options include RANKing the records by Author to determine expertise and relationships between authors and inventors, or by Corporate Source to understand a company's pattern of collaboration or location of research, or in the case of Inspec, by Treatment Code, which allows you to distinguish between the various levels of research, e.g., General Review, Theoretical, Applied or practical research.

Innography makes it easy
Innography, an analytic and visualization tool, complements the precision IP searching of Dialog as an analysis post-processor. Innography makes it easy to determine specific IPC8s for any given selection of patents.

With Innography, you can collect and analyze individual or collections of patents that can be further refined by IPC codes. In this example we see the IPC8 for inkjet technology, i.e., B41J. Now it's easy to find and analyze NPL published prior to or since the patent of interest's priority date.

 Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

Retirement of DWPI First View (Dialog — File 331)
The Derwent World Patents Index First View^SM (DWPI First View^SM) (File 331) database will no longer be available after July 30, 2010. The final update (201040) will be made on approximately June 25, and the file will then remain static until July 30, allowing users to retrieve any saved search results. During that period, users may see duplicate results between searches run on both Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) (File 351) and DWPI First View, as we no longer will be removing records from DWPI First View when they are input into DWPI. Following the retirement, Thomson Reuters will continue to work on the remaining patents in the file, which will be loaded into DWPI as the value-added abstracts and indexing become available.

DWPI First View was launched in 2004 to provide faster access to data from new patents not yet available in the main DWPI database. In recent years, however, significant improvements have been made to the timeliness of DWPI. On average, records are now being loaded within 15 days of publication date. While the DWPI timeliness improvements greatly benefit users, they also impact the content and size of DWPI First View. The amount of time patent records are stored in DWPI First View has been considerably reduced, as well as the overall size of DWPI First View in terms of the number of patents in the file at any particular time. These factors have diminished the value of DWPI First View for customers.

The main DWPI database will not be affected by this change, and records will continue to be produced as normal. Alerts running in DWPI First View can be migrated to the main DWPI file to provide a continued alerting service. Please contact the for details.

New coverage in DWPI — French Granted Patents
The coverage of France in Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) (File 351)has been enhanced as of May 2010 with the inclusion of French Granted patents (FR B), adding to the existing coverage of French Applications in the file. The Granted Patents mainly will be equivalents within the DWPI patent family. The first records to be processed will be those published in January 2010, and they are expected to be included from DWPI Update 201029.

A catch-up plan will be implemented over subsequent DWPI updates to bring the timeliness of the coverage into line with the French applications.

The table below details the new coverage of Granted patents and the existing coverage of Applications.

Note: FR-E (Additions up to 1969) and FR-M (Medicaments up to 1979) were previously covered in DWPI.

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

"Be careful how you're wielding that knife," he said offhandedly.
In last month's column, I talked about prioritizing items before entering them in a search such that the most important ones are entered first, which may save you from having to enter the other terms. Here I'll continue with another way of combining concepts — the combination of "facets" of a search, which is based on some earlier theories on searching.

This prioritizing technique is used in everyday life. Whenever I feel like cooking something, I look for the main part of the meal first (like steak) and then purchase a medley of vegetables to go along with the protein. If I like the poblano peppers at the store, then I combine other vegetables that would be appropriate for a Mexican dish, and if the peppers don't look appetizing, then maybe it will be just a steak on the grill with corn on the cob and a baked potato, or maybe just a lot of vegetables to complement the meat in a stew. Thus, the main part of the meal determines the accompanying veggies and starch.

The chef's criticism of the cooking student's handling of vegetables made the pupil stew.
Sometimes you're just in the mood for a stew; so, you pick up some protein that will withstand hours of slow cooking, and you pile in as many vegetables as possible — some veggies, like carrots, celery and onions (mirepoix, from France, for example) — just as you might consider grouping together certain concepts in very small groups when creating your search strategy.

Some patent searches will involve numerous terms and typically a searcher feels obligated to use every one of them. But, ANDing together too many concepts can quite often lead to zero hits. If it does, then the tendency is to drop one of the important concepts. For example, finding patents on, "Protection from radiation from high-voltage overhead lines in the prevention of cancer," could be broken up into as many as six or so concepts. But, if you were to enter each of these six concepts (protection, radiation, high-voltage, overhead lines, prevention, cancer) and then AND them together, you may miss essential hits. Even fleshing out the concepts (cancer OR neoplasms, protection OR shielding, radiation OR irradiated or ionizing, etc.), and then combining them all together may still miss good hits.

"Just watch what I'm doing with my finger," he said pointedly.
So, consider this approach: whenever you have a long list of concepts, first prioritize the concepts from most important to least; then combine them together, but only two concepts at a time. In this example, select the first two most important concepts and combine them together with an AND, then repeat with the next two most important concepts. The result will have several sets (in this case, three) that illuminate particular facets of the problem. These facets can be ORed together to yield one large set that covers each facet of the problem. This combining concepts together in groups of two and then ORing them together allows you to find peripheral hits that may be of interest without having to worry about being too narrow. Thus:

    SELECT CANCER AND OVERHEAD(W)LINE?
    SELECT RADIATION AND PROTECT?
    SELECT PREVENT? AND HIGH(W)VOLT?
    SELECT S1 OR S2 OR S3

So, instead of one statement which may yield zero hits, we end up with a set containing certain specific facets of the search. This could be critical to finding not only peripheral art, but also instances in which patents cover the invention you are looking for but in which obscure terms are used to identify it. And, this could lead to related prior art that might have been missed if you simply combined all of the concepts together at once. And yes, there's a difference between a steak dinner with a baked potato and a bowl of stew.

 Market: Business & News Content Updates

Keeping you up to date on China
China, the most highly populated country in the world, continues to emerge on the global stage as an economic powerhouse. It has increased the number of patents filed, R&D articles written, amount of money invested in environmental technologies and much more. And, China has been on Dialog's mind too. With the launch of Chinese Patents Fulltext (File 325) Dialog has 3.5 million, never-before English-translated Chinese patents. But, that's not all. Dialog also has information on Chinese companies, as well as business and industry news, about this influential giant.

Find the company
If you are looking for private companies in the People's Republic of China, Mergent™ China Private Company Database (File 558) can help you. The file contains names, business descriptions, product and brand names, executives, and for many companies up to three years of financial data. Innovative companies, such as: Huawei Technology Co, Ltd., a top communications equipment company located in Beijing that rivals Ericsson and Nokia Siemens; BYD, the Chinese car and battery maker working on energy-efficiency and Baidu On-Line Network Technology Co. Ltd., with its Chinese search engine product are just a few of the important companies appearing in File 558. Industry databases like Cengage/Gale PROMT^® (File 16) or Trade and Industry Database™ (File 148) and Business & Industry™ (File 9) keep you abreast of new products and business dealings from companies like Huawei with its next generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) networking technology, and BYD and its electric vehicles and new headquarters in Los Angeles.

What's in the news?
News sources such as China Daily.com, China Post and others from Dialog NewsRoom (File 990) bring you the news of companies, economics and industry from China. For example, a news article from China Daily.com indicates China has seven brands in the top 100 global brands according to the recent Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2010 survey. China Mobile heads the list in eighth position with a brand value of $52.6 billion. Others include Bank of China, PetroChina, Baidu, the China Internet search engine company and China Merchants Bank. Global Reporter (File 20), updated multiple times per day, contains more than 2.2 million records for GN=China (Also 190082 for GN=SHANGHAI and 329019 for GN=SINGAPORE etc.), and is searchable by CO=/CO. In addition, World News Connection (File 985), also updated multiple times per day, is a good source for China news and other information and also offers a company name (CO) search.

No matter what country you are targeting for business development, Dialog can provide the company profiles, business, economics, country information and news you need to feel confident when your company looks to open a new market.