From the Editor
We enjoyed visiting with many of you at another eventful SLA annual conference last month in New Orleans, Louisiana.  It was good to see you at the Dialog/ProQuest booth, where we demonstrated Dialog’s forthcoming new product, as well as at our many events. We kicked off the week with a champagne reception to honor winners of three awards: the Roger K. Summit Scholarship, the Australian Info Pro of the Year, and the Quantum² InfoStars, all of which are part of Dialog’s and ProQuest's long-term commitment to the information professional community.

As a major partner of SLA 2010, Dialog sponsored quite a few main conference events as well as over 25 divisional sessions. Highlights include:

• Introduction of the closing keynote speaker, Nicholas Carr, by Suzanne BeDell, Dialog General Manager
• Panel on relevancy of taxonomies, chaired by Suzanne BeDell. See the video of this presentation.
• Overview of the new Dialog, presented by Lynn Christie, Vice President Global Product Management. (View at www.dialog.com/feature)
• Sponsorship of the IT/LMD/PAM Tuesday night dance party
  

Did you know...
ProQuest has developed an American Library Association Spectrum Scholarship named in honor of Ron Clowney, former ProQuest vice president who passed away in May. The Spectrum Scholarship Program, the ALA’s national diversity and recruitment effort, is highly regarded and designed to address the under-representation of ethnic librarians within the profession.

The Ron Clowney Spectrum Scholar will receive a $5,000 scholarship, the opportunity to participate in the ALA Spectrum Leadership Institute and ALA conferences and additional valuable professional benefits. Learn more about the Spectrum Scholarship program on the ALA Website.

 

Message from Suzanne BeDell — ProQuest and Dialog: Getting things done
As ProQuest and Dialog celebrate their second anniversary together this month, Suzanne BeDell, General Manager of Dialog, marks the occasion with an update on Dialog’s promise to merge the Dialog and DataStar products. She describes the first release of the new product later this summer, centered on the pharmaceutical and biomedical collections as well as the Fall 2010 release. Suzanne also previews 2011 releases for “power searchers.” Read Suzanne’s entire message and learn more about content, the search interface and pricing. Join the customer panel to see previews of each release. This is an exciting time at Dialog, and we urge you to be involved!

 

Free Files of the Month for July and August

July — Chinese Patents Fulltext
More than 25 years of Chinese patents (applications, grants and utility models) — machine translated from Chinese to English –— are available in Chinese Patents Fulltext (File 325), the Free File of the Month for July.  With the number of Chinese patents increasing daily, access to File 325 is more important than ever.

The documents contain the most current full-text information available from SIPO (the Chinese Patent Office). Records generally include the patent title, abstracts, inventor, description, claims, priority information and other fields plus the most current legal status information available – all in a single Dialog record.  Features of File 325 include:

• More than 3.7 million Chinese patent documents translated into English
• Coverage from 1985 through the present
• A clipped front-page image in certain formats in approximately 82 percent of the documents (in certain formats)
• A Chinese language PDF document in nearly 98 percent of documents available for download via Dialog eLinks
• Up-to-date legal status information in human-translated English
• Patent assignees and inventor names in human-translated English

In addition, about 10,000 to 12,000 new and updated patent documents are added weekly, approximately two weeks after publication by SIPO. 

Learn more about the database in the Overview of Chinese Patents Fulltext. Throughout July, explore this file up to $100 for free (either DialUnits or Connect Time). Output and Alerts charges are not included. Attend overview sessions on Chinese Patents Fulltext scheduled on July 20 and 28.

August — Adis databases
Adis databases, produced by Wolters Kluwer Pharma Solutions, offer the most comprehensive and objective, evidence-based information on clinical pharmacology, drug development, pharmacoeconomics, drug safety and medical biotechnology. These files, a recommended first stop for the serious researcher, are Free Files of the Month on Dialog for August.

From the earliest laboratory report to world market launch, every scientific or commercial development advancing a drug's progress to market is assessed, evaluated and reported in Adis R&D Insight (File 107). In Adis Clinical Trials Insight (File 173), you can find summaries of study definition and results. Adis Newsletters (File 428) contains all the news and full-text articles from Inpharma^® (INP) (1992–2008), Reactions™ (REA) and Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes News™ (PON), formerly PharmacoResources. These three databases provide comprehensive coverage of the pharmaceutical industry.

Why use these databases?
Adis databases contain information to help you effectively monitor competitor pipelines, evaluate products in development, assess commercial potential of upcoming products, identify drug safety events and find and evaluate precise trial evidence.

Review the Overview of the Adis databases and explore these databases up to $100 for free throughout August.

 

Stories from the front lines
Dialog has been helping customers with search needs for more than 35 years. Read on as a librarian tells us how Dialog adds value to the research process.

Combine fast facts with comprehensive research
At SLA one user reported the following story: “I work for a hospital where getting the right information is time-critical. I can get the nuggets in a few minutes on Dialog to deliver to the doctors. One piece of information was from a paper presented at the Academy of Physical Medicine. There were seven cases found over a six-month research cycle to change pain medication. I first went on rounds with physicians then researched and reported on findings.”

Dialog also helped this researcher in other ways. “I also use business databases to provide necessary information to the administrative team for the hospital, so Dialog helps with both medical research and business operations.  And, technical support on Dialog is excellent!” 

— (research librarian at a Rehabilitation Hospital,
Wheaton, Ill, USA)

 

 Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

Indian coverage in DWPI
The latest development to the Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) (File 351) is the completion of a project to extend the coverage of Indian Granted patents in DWPI back to January 2000. The increase in the coverage of Indian granted patents further improves the coverage of this important authority in DWPI and continues to position DWPI as the leading provider of value added global patent content, with a particular strength in the coverage of Asian authorities as well as a key resource for prior art and patentability searching, and for competitor/technology trend analysis.

Through the DWPI value-added editorial process, the original content has been extensively enhanced by our editorial team to eliminate wherever possible any inconsistencies within the bibliographic data. English titles and abstracts have also been provided for all records. These records are fully indexed to include Derwent Classes, DWPI manual coding, chemical indexing and enhanced polymer indexing, with the chemical structures also covered in the Derwent Chemistry Resource (File 355).

 

Retirement of DWPI First View (File 331)
As a reminder, 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 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 Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) (File 351) file to provide a continued alerting service. Please contact for details and review the article in the June Chronolog.

 

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

Citing Non-Patent Prior Art
A devilish way to find unusual citations is to check the non-patent literature (NPL) found in a patent’s cited literature. Unlike the cited patents that are very uniform in format, NPL is quite often loosely cited, to say the least.

Cite me quick!
A bit about citations: because the applicant has incorporated this prior art in the application for a patent, you can assume the drafter of the application has written the claims around these works. Better, you can assume the examiner has looked at the citations, both patent and non-patent and has given the nod to the applicant that the application is distinct from these citations. This is why applicants are encouraged to list as much cited art as possible since it would be difficult to use these citations against the patent in litigation. And, like any citations, these prior publications can be as useful a source of information as the citations in a doctoral dissertation. In either publication, learned individuals research the state of the art and discover useful citations that are then made public — just like a literature search! So, if you find a cognizant patent, the cited art can be a telescope into areas that would take you a long time to find even if you had the same resources.

While this sounds wonderful, the aforementioned problems with the formatting of the NPL makes this information problematic. In Dialog, the NPL can be found under the prefix code RF=, and is at least word-searchable in all of our major patent files. So, you can find how many times Mad Magazine was cited in US Patents (11 times, sometimes as the only citation) or even Popular Science or Popular Mechanics (thousands each). These are found by simply entering, for example, RF=(Popular(w)Science), but if you want to add in more of a citation, it may be best to enter terms one at a time, since there is no standardization of volume, issue, date, page or title/authors. You can expand RF= to see what is available because in several patent databases this field is also phrase searchable. If you do, you will find this interesting citation from US 5570704: Reader’s Digest, condensed from Old Farmer’s Almanac, Jim Collins, Snore No More,” which is really a citation of a citation of an original article, assuming that the Old Farmer wasn’t just citing something else.

Proof of Dialog searches in patent research...
You do run into many (thousands) of patents citing simply, “Dialog File Number, Record Number...”, not a proper way to cite an original work, though it is possible to find the record addressed in most cases. If you do run into such, simply log into Dialog, open the database number and use the direct TYPE command to find the record, assuming we have not reloaded the database since it was listed in the patent. Thus, a citation from US 6529886: “Dialog (File 621, Accession No. 01069016,” could be searched by entering File 621 (B 621) and then entering TYPE 01069016/9 in which the number (9) after the slash is the format code for a full document.

How to drive a reference librarian out of patents...
A great list of cited art that would cause an experienced reference librarian to give up can be found in a patent that shall remain numberless, though you could find it if you wished. It includes the following as cited NPL:

• Zippy, no date, Child's toy foam rubber products.
• "Toobers & Zots" Construction Toy, from "Zippy," no date given.
• Kenmatic Industries, No Date, Hair care foam rubber product.
• "Hair Twirlers" A Sponge Rubber Hair Care Product, Kinematic Industries & Co., no date given.
• Actual embodiment of a Toober (cited in publications of underlying patent application by Daniel).
• Verified Complaint for Damages and Injunctive Relief Jury Demand Endorsed Hereon and Civil Cover Sheet, Nov. 25, 2003.
• Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction, Nov. 25, 2003.
• Defendant Kwiktwist Corporation's Answer, Affirmative Defenses, and Counterclaims, Dec. 18, 2003.
• Plaintiff Handle It Limited Liability Company's Reply and Affirmative Defenses to Defendant's Counterclaims, Jan. 5, 2004.
• Response to Plaintiff's Motion for Temporary Restraining, Jan. 2, 2004.
• Order Denying Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction, Feb. 13, 2004.
• Request for Reexamination of U.S. Patent No. 6,113,170.
• Reexamination exhibit-photograph of "Hair Twirler" and "Toober" construction toy.
• Order Granting Request for Ex Parte Reexamination of U.S. patent No. 6,113,170.
• Office Action Mailed Mar. 17, 2006 for U.S. Appl. No. 90/007,077.

My favorites are the items with no dates, but especially the restraining orders. When is the last time you thought to search restraining orders for prior art? Better yet, where do you find, let alone get, an “Actual embodiment of a Toober?”

Finally, one cannot forget blogs! These, fortunately, are a bit easier to find because the citations tend to have a date and URL, and it is best to search them by EXPANDing RF= or SELECTing individual pieces of the URL, assuming that non-alphanumerics like periods and @ signs are treated as spaces. At issue, though, is how reliable these postings are as prior art. And, yes, I did check and so far only a few hits for YouTube and Facebook in the RF= field, but no Tweets, except citations to articles by a poor individual by that name who may regret his last name. Again, not everyone is fortunate enough to have a last name like Kaminecki.

 

 Learn about ProQuest

ProQuest launches science and technology collections
ProQuest has once again redefined information solutions for science and technology research by releasing the four remaining full-text Science and Technology Collections on ProQuest Central.

As mentioned in the April Chronolog , our renowned CSA Illumina™ platform discipline-oriented databases have recently evolved to feature “deep indexing” enhancements – and now comes the ability to retrieve the full text of many of the citation records with a simple mouse click! With these developments, our new collections provide researchers with the most comprehensive information solutions for the scientific market today!

The final four new science and technology collections include:

• ProQuest SciTech Collection — contains both the ProQuest Natural Science Collection and the ProQuest Technology Collection
• ProQuest Natural Science Collection — contains all six Natural Science Collections, plus Illustrata: Natural Sciences
• ProQuest Computer Science Collection — contains Computer and Information Systems Abstracts and ProQuest Computer Science journals
• ProQuest Polymer Science Collection — full-text component to Polymer Library

Click here for a list of ProQuest’s new science and technology collections.

 

Special 25% discount on new subscriptions to Professional ABI/INFORM Complete on ProQuest
ABI/Inform Complete is still available at a record low cost through July 31. Take advantage of this offer today.

Contact your Dialog account manager for additional details or call the Global Customer Support Team at 1-800-334-2564 ( North America) or +00 800 33 34 2564 (Rest of World) or email for more information or to request a free trial.