From the Editor
It’s been just one month since the launch of the new ProQuest Dialog™ service, and already enthusiastic comments are streaming in. Read what users are saying, and learn more about it! Also in this issue, take advantage of Alert profile discounts in Chinese Patents Fulltext, the Chinese patents database unique to Dialog. And, search Dialog NewsRoom, containing more than 12,000 sources. It’s the Free File of the Month! Sign up for Dialog Forums, new training classes and more. It’s all at Dialog!

ProQuest ranks 17 in InformationWeek 500
ProQuest broke the top 20 in InformationWeek's top 500 innovative technology companies, ranking 17th in its second consecutive appearance in the InformationWeek 500 and its first appearance in the top 20. ProQuest is recognized for its use of innovation in the development of user-centered search technologies that advance research in academic and professional settings.

"ProQuest is seeing the payoff for its commitment to technology innovation in a number of ways,” says Chief Information Officer Bipin Patel. “We've enabled researchers to accomplish their goals and add to the world's knowledge; libraries are able to serve their patrons with cutting-edge online services; and now, to have this recognition from an esteemed organization such as InformationWeek is truly gratifying.  We aim to set the bar ever higher for those serving researchers, and this shows us we're heading in the right direction."

Each year, InformationWeek, a premier source of news and analysis of leading-edge products and vendors in the business IT industry, selects the nation's most innovative users of business technology. The InformationWeek 500 list is considered to be unique among industry rankings for its spotlight on the power of innovation in information technology.

What users are saying about ProQuest Dialog
Easy navigation. User friendly. The ability to filter large amounts of information. A personal area in Dialog where my searches are stored so that I can look at my search results later. Tangential searching that permits me to find related articles. These are just some of the comments customers relayed to us during the more than six months of research we conducted to develop the new ProQuest Dialog™ service. Our goal for ProQuest Dialog—to create a search service that meets the needs of scientists and engineers and intellectual property, marketing and information professionals—is a mighty task. Recent survey results indicate the first release of ProQuest Dialog hit the mark.

Customers surveyed post-launch include hands-on Dialog and non-Dialog end users of online biomedical research and information professionals or users who served as specialist searchers on behalf of others. What impressed these users about ProQuest Dialog? Read on for their enthusiastic comments.

• Liked the new easy-to-understand interface, sufficiently flexible and efficient, and useful as a tool for biomedical research. One scientist favored “the clean, modern, professional-looking design” and the “simplicity and familiarity of a single search box.”
• Valued the entire range of iterative filtering and the date-range histogram available to define searches with increasing specificity for its greater ease of use, especially for new users or when a more experienced user was “rusty.”
• Welcomed the mouse-over previews of documents available from the initial search results.
• Found useful automatically generated recommendations of related articles provided alongside retrieved documents.
• Welcomed the inclusion and visibility of print, email, cite, export, save, and tag options for taking action on a retrieved document.
• Identified as important the customization and personalization features that enable easy collaboration with colleagues.
• Valued the ability to save documents, lists, searches, etc. in personally managed folders in My Research.

Dialog is committed to building a service that meets your needs. Sign up on the User Panel to view latest developments and offer your ideas and comments. With your help, Dialog’s next release of ProQuest Dialog (coming soon!) will meet even more user needs!

Special Limited Time Offer!

50% Off Alert Profiles in Chinese Patents Fulltext (File 325) on Dialog
There’s still time to receive 50% off Alert profiles in Chinese Patents Fulltext. Through October 31, 2010, Dialog customers can enjoy 50% off the standard published price for all Alert profiles in the new Chinese Patents Fulltext (File 325). It’s the world’s only collection in English of full-text Chinese patent and utility model publications issued since the beginning of the modern Chinese patent authority in 1985. Updated weekly, English translations of the Chinese patents are created using state-of-the-art statistical machine- translation technology combined with human-assisted intellectual processing and are available online approximately two weeks after publication by the Chinese Patent Office (SIPO).

In short, Chinese Patents Fulltext allows patent researchers to perform a fully detailed search of the complete specification of a Chinese patent application, in English, with the addition of the most up-to-date legal status information, enabling activities such as competitor tracking. 

Searchable bibliographic data consists of translated patent applicant/assignee names and inventor names, International Patent Classification (IPC) codes, and standardized patent and application numbers. Priority application numbers are standardized in Dialog format for easy cross-file searching in other patent databases and most records also contain translated legal status updated whenever new legal status events affecting the document have occurred. 

If you are a patent information specialist or examiner conducting prior art searches, a patent attorney conducting clearance searching, or simply doing business in China, this file is for you!

For additional details, contact your Dialog account manager or the Global Customer Support Team at . We hope you'll take advantage of this limited time offer for half price Alert profiles in the Chinese Patents Fulltext database on Dialog and get started tracking the innovation happening now in China.

Free Files of the Month for October
Whether you are looking for global or local news, industry trends or corporate news releases, you can find the information in Dialog NewsRoom databases (Files 990-998) — the October Free Files of the Month!

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, NewsRoom covers global regions, including emerging markets and countries such as Cuba and Iran. Comprehensive subject coverage comprises aerospace and defense to environmental science to pharmaceuticals and telecommunications, to name a few.

Use NewsRoom to find:

• breaking news
• profiles of senior company executives
• information on investing and doing business in emerging markets
• reviews of competitors’ activities and products
• reactions to the recent economic crisis by the world's business community.

NewsRoom contains more than 12,000 sources, most in full text, from the world’s important trade and business publications, scholarly journals, local newspapers, regional business publications, national and international business newspapers, industry newsletters, broadcast transcripts and corporate news releases. To maximize your online research effectiveness, File 990 is updated continuously throughout the day and contains the current four months of data. File 989, also updated continuously, includes the current seven days. An archive from 2000 through 2009 is also available.

The database is enhanced with rich indexing enabling highly specific retrieval of relevant articles. Use JN= to search your topic in specific sources (e.g., JN=New York Times). EXPAND to see the source in the Dialog index. Check the interactive, searchable list of all publications, regions and subjects covered in NewsRoom online.

Search up to $100 for free in the files (Connect Time or DialUnits) in October. Output and Alerts costs are not included. See an Overview of Dialog NewsRoom to learn more about this premier business and news database.

Note: Learn more about this free file, when you register for “Harnessing the Power of Dialog NewsRoom (Files 990-998) with Effective Search Techniques,” October 7 and 13.

Stories from the front lines
Not only does Dialog have a wealth of content and specialized indexing for pinpoint searching, but it also enables you to create a customized workflow through its customized reports . A pharmaceutical company in China tells how.

“My pharmaceutical firm needed to know whether pharmaceutical patents had been or may be patented in China, so we built an efficient workflow with Dialog’s help. Using the INPADOC database (File 345), we defined an .xslt template file to pick up application dates and patent numbers, beginning with ‘CN’ or ‘WO’ from the patent family. Once we had the patent numbers, we searched Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) (File 351), downloaded the records into .xml format and transferred the results into an Excel^® format using a pre-defined .xlst template. The Dialog ERA^SM (Electronic Redistribution and Archiving) service enabled us to upload these records into our self-designed Medicinal Knowledge Innovation Support System (MKISS) to share this data with our research team and do more analysis work with the information.”

 Discover: Engineering and Technology Research Content Updates

Gather competitive product and strategic intelligence from non-traditional sources
The number of published research papers increases each year, and countries such as China and India are producing record numbers of scholarly papers in scientific and technical fields. This is evident in Ei Compendex^® (File 8), a technical database on Dialog, which adds tens of thousands of documents in each weekly update.

While academic researchers publish mainly for tenure, their counterparts in industry publish to earn credibility among their peers. Commercial researchers generally publish within the purview of their employer and along the lines of their own research interest. This information is valuable, as you can tell a great deal about a company's product interests by analyzing the publications of their researchers. Here’s how.

Non-traditional CI sources
Dialog contains numerous databases categorized into major literature collections, such as bioscience (BIOSCI), chemical literature (CHEMLIT), environment (ENVIRON) and many more. These databases comprise papers from professional societies like IEEE in engineering and commercial papers from sources, including Elsevier, CSA and academic institutions.

The RANK command
Many CI professionals overlook the vast wealth of competitive intelligence information contained within the technical literature databases. What can these research papers tell you about your competitors? The Dialog RANK command provides the ability to perform trend or statistical analysis on an existing search set. The Dialog system extracts terms from the specified field(s) in a set of records, and then lists them in ranked order, with the most highly posted term appearing first. In the following example, we’ll use the RANK command to glean various nuggets of competitive intelligence information about the company Avago Technologies.

Using one of Dialog’s major literature collections, engineering (ENG), we’ll search 39 databases for the corporate source Avago Technologies and its product “film bulk acoustic resonators.”

We’ll start our analysis by RANKing the Corporate Source field (CS) to see where papers are originating. Our results suggest a number of papers from Avago researchers in San Jose, California, and Fort Collins, Colorado, and the Wireless Semiconductor Division, as well as sites in Singapore and Malaysia. Papers from Singapore and Malaysia suggest perhaps Avago is collaborating with companies in these Asian countries.

RANK: S2/1-220   Field: CS=  File(s): 2,6,8,14,23,25,
     31,32,33,34,35,36,46,-
 (Rank fields found in 211 records -- 293 unique terms) 
     Page 1 of 37
RANK No.  Items  Term
--------  -----  ----
    1      80   USA
    2      25   MALAYSIA
    3      22   AVAGO TECHNOL., SAN JOSE, CA
    4      12   AVAGO TECHNOL., FORT COLLINS, CO
    5      10   SINGAPORE
    6       8   AVAGO TECHNOL., INC., SAN JOSE, CA
    7       8   WIRELESS SEMICOND. DIV., AVAGO TECHNOL., SAN J
    8       6   WIRELESS SEMICOND. DIV., AVAGO TECHNOL. INC.,

RANKing other fields provides even more intelligence:

• Authors (AU) identify who the brain trust is in this technology
• Descriptors (DE) suggest other names for a product a company might be developing: BULK ACOUSTIC WAVE DEVICES, ACOUSTIC RESONATORS and III-V SEMICONDUCTORS
• Journals (JN) carrying these papers indicate subscriptions a company should be purchasing
• The Treatment Code (TC) provides the level of technology of the paper — practical or experimental
• Identifiers are usually new terms indexed in Dialog records so RANKing Identifiers (ID) is important to R&D because they show what’s happening in the laboratory.

As a result of Dialog’s extensive indexing, its powerful RANK command and broad range of technical literature, engineers have all the resources they need to explore their competitors — to even identify who is innovating in the “white space!”

 Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

Dialog partners with WIPO

Dialog and others in the patent database provider community have entered into a partnership, Access to Specialized Patent Information (ASPI), with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

"All of us at Dialog and our parent ProQuest are proud to be part of this partnership," said Lynn Christie, Dialog's vice-president of product management. "By providing access to patent content, tools, and training to the least developed countries in the world, we hope to play a role in achieving the ASPI's goal of promoting the integration of developing countries into the global knowledge economy. We share WIPO's view that this initiative will contribute to the fostering of innovation and thus an improvement in the economic welfare of people in these countries." 

The program will run through 2015, in alignment with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Read the entire press release.

DWPI new coverage — Philippine Applications and Utility Models
The coverage of the Philippines in DWPI (Files 351/352, 350) has been extended to include Patent Applications (PH A) and Utility Models (PH Z), adding to the existing coverage of Granted Patents in the file. Any of the new records identified as a basic will include a DWPI title, abstract and DWPI manual coding, where applicable. The coverage will start with January 2010 Patent Gazette entries with the first records expected to appear in the product from update 201057.

This table details the number formats for the new coverage of Applications and Utility Models and the existing coverage of Granted patents.

Note: The DWPI patent numbers comprise a 10-digit serial number for the PH national filings and an 11-digit serial number for the PCT filings. This is because when the PH New Law application numbers started in 1999, they were of the format 1-YYYY-NNNNN (i.e., 5 digits after the year) and an extra leading zero was added later. For consistency, the extra leading zero is now removed. The PCT filing numbers, which have not been covered previously in DWPI, have always had 6-digit number ranges, starting at 500001 each year.

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

A column about nothing
In a prior job I was in charge of editing Alert profiles. I noticed one profile routinely found no hits, even though it was run every week and the customer paid for it. So, I broadened some terms and shortened some class codes until the profile received a handful of hits per update.

No sooner had the results gone out when I receive a panicked call from the customer who wanted to know who else is working on her technology? She had thought her competitors were now applying for patents and publishing articles on what she had been hoping to invent, when up to this point, no one was doing so. When I explained I broadened the profile so she would not receive a notice that there was nothing of interest to her that week, she asked me to change the profile back as she was comfortable seeing nothing of interest every week. And paying for nothing! I wish I could use her comment as a quote in other areas in which what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but she was comfortable with the level of specificity and demanded the profile continue in oblivion. You can’t help everyone!

Thus I learned firsthand that in intellectual property, nothing is something. Indeed, this is especially true about trademarks in which many searches are conducted with the wish that no one has trademarked your favorite string of characters. This also carries over to the repair shop looking at what’s wrong with your car, the plumber looking for leaks or your doctor giving you a summary of your last examination. In any of these cases, when you are told nothing was found, you are not only happy, you may be ecstatic.

“Nothing” is the new “What’s there?”
Nothing is a valid answer only if in fact nothing is there. If a proper search was conducted (for a leaking gasket in your car’s engine block, an underground leak in your water supply or a tumor in your physical) and you are confident that, indeed, nothing was there, then all is well. But how do you confidently say there is nothing there?

One way is to rely on multiple sources like a second opinion. Another is what I call “pointability." By this I mean one can always point to something else for responsibility, such as the reliability of a source. If you find something wrong with an online search report, you can point to the searcher, who in turn can point to the vendor used by the searcher who in turn can point to the database who in turn can point to the publisher who can then point a finger at the author. Authors point to citations or to facts they have found in a nearly endless cycle of bibliographic citations, research findings and quotes. So, if you do a search and find nothing, is it because you didn’t find anything or because there is nothing there? If you state there really is nothing there, you had better finish the sentence with the word, “because,” and then list the steps you took.

If this search took .01 seconds, how long will it take to read?
I love search engines that proudly proclaim your search yielded 100,000 hits. Of course, unless you scale your search down to a number of hits you will actually read, or you do read all 100,000 hits, you cannot point to any excuse if you find nothing. So, you need other tools or strategies to narrow the focus to a reasonable number you actually will read. Patent examiners have told me they routinely read thousands of patents found in a search, and I imagine many outside searchers will agree they too read equal amounts, though the number of hits reviewed depends on what the person is comfortable reading.

Sleep better tonight after cooking up these recipes
If it is only you who will be responsible for finding patent information to inform major decisions, you will need your own pointable reasons why you found nothing. Several strategies can make a finding of nothing more reliable:

• Use the EXPAND command to test what’s actually in the index. So, if you misspell a word, it is easier to determine there may be other spellings for it.
• Use a “term of art” (if it exists, so always ask), a word or phrase unique to the subject area that identifies the exact technology (like RFID for radio frequency identification).
• Use tried and true “recipe” strategies like:
  • The Building Block. Search one concept after another with each concept in one set so the sets can be manipulated to find an appropriate number of hits.
  • The Bridge. Transform a chemical name into a CAS^® Registry Number, then take the RN to a database that has both Registry Numbers and patent numbers like CA Search^®: Chemical Abstracts File 399), and then search the PNs in a patent database like Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) File 351).
  • Pearl Growing. Start with one patent and use international patent classification codes to “grow” the results.
  • RANKing. Use the RANK command to sort the patent class codes in a retrieval to determine the proper codes to use and change your search accordingly.
  • Cherry Picking. Conduct a normal search, pick the best hits, keep them in set zero and then RANK this set of hand-picked items by class code to find the best codes for searching.
  • Claims Focus. This is an extension of Cherry Picking, but search only the claims field of a patent to find appropriate terminology to recheck the search — an essential tool for freedom to operate searches.

I realize the above are simply shortened recipes — feel free to check our training site to learn about these techniques first hand. Finding nothing does not mean you did nothing! If you have questions, contact me directly, because I really like looking at nothing.

 Learn about ProQuest

World Bank (IBRD) Reports added to ABI/INFORM
Reports from the World Bank are now available on ProQuest in ABI/INFORM Complete . They contain extensive research findings that aid in the study of the global financial crisis, environmental data and development statistics. The reports from the International Bank for Reconstruction include the Doing Business reports, World Development Indicators 2009, Global Monitoring Report, The Little Green Data Book 2009 and Global Development Finance 2009.

Demonstrating technology thought leadership
During the SLA Annual Conference in New Orleans, ProQuest and Dialog presented a “Hot Topic” panel discussion titled “Does Taxonomy Matter in a New World of Search and Discovery?” with panelists Jabe Wilson from Elsevier; Tim Mohler from Lexalytics; and Tyron Stading from Innography, The panel members each had a different take on the value of taxonomies and ontologies, but overall, as to whether taxonomies matter in the world of search and discovery, each one answered a resounding yes. View the SLA “Hot Topic” panel discussion here.

The September/October 2010 issue of ONLINE magazine featured this same topic in an article by Suzanne BeDell and Libby Trudell, in which they contrast the search styles of information professionals and end users and discuss the outlook for blending taxonomy in the new world of search, as well as examine a variety of tools including entity extraction, classification and categorization. The authors also explore recent advances in the online industry with the dawn of layers of analysis and data mining, along with new Dialog and ProQuest tools being developed to link and leverage controlled vocabularies to find unseen connections among companies, people and technologies.