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From the Editor

The new ProQuest Dialog™ now combines the ease of use of a Web search engine with the sophistication and power of Dialog set searching, controlled vocabulary and proximity. In our ProQuest Dialog Updates, learn more about a new feature in ProQuest Dialog that will help you easily match authors with their affiliations. You can also read about the unique content in World News Connection, Dialog's free file for April. And, on the support side, check out the new training sessions, and take a peek at the upcoming ProQuest Dialog Support Center—all in this issue!

 

 ProQuest Dialog Updates

Tracking author affiliation easier than ever

ProQuest Dialog offers several features that foster collaboration between colleagues within an organization. But what about facilitating collaboration between unassociated researchers? Determining an author's specific affiliation provides many opportunities — whether for a scientist hoping to find others working in a field of interest for possible collaborative research, a legal firm looking for an expert witness, a research division seeking key opinion leaders or even recruiters looking for potential new employees. Some organizations also use author-affiliation matching as a means to create current bibliographies for their authors.

STM databases don't usually offer the ability to pinpoint an author in this manner. They generally track just the first author or correspondence/reprint author. However, a number of scientific and technical databases on ProQuest Dialog include specific author-affiliation matching within the body of full-text records—a real bonus! Try this feature, available in databases including Embase^®, SciSearch^®: a Cited Science Reference Database, PASCAL, Inspec^® and Ei Compendex^®.

A good example of specific author-affiliation matching comes from PASCAL in a record containing 49 authors from 23 different affiliations. Note each author has an affiliation designated by a number following the author's name. If more than one author is affiliated with the same organization it is given the same number. With ProQuest Dialog, you can now track all authors' affiliations from the same record.

 

Coming soon! ProQuest Dialog Support Center

What is stemming? How does left-hand truncation work? How can I search and receive results in Japanese? Do you have a question about ProQuest Dialog and can't find the answer? Try the new searchable ProQuest Dialog Support Center coming soon. Browse through FAQs for ProQuest Dialog; look up content information and find help information on search syntax, system features and more! The ProQuest Dialog Support Center will contain materials and search tips developed by our expert Product Development and Global Customer Support teams.

 

It's easier on ProQuest Dialog

Quickly find developing technologies and trends
Whether you need top, authoritative articles about competitors, emerging technologies and innovations or comprehensive global analysis of new products and trends, ProQuest Dialog lets you find what you need easily and quickly. Here's a look at how a searcher can gain competitive and technical intelligence.

PepsiCo research example
In light of the recent PepsiCo announcement on its all-plant materials bottle, a recent basic search in all nine subject areas in ProQuest Dialog for biodegradable plastic yielded some 34,500 results, which were easily narrowed using Search Within or Narrow by results features. After searching within for words like patent or innovate* or develop*, results sorted by relevance revealed a whole history of the science going back decades, indicating this is not a new concept. Using the date slider to narrow results to the most recent years — 2010-2011 — interesting competitive intelligence emerged. Companies such as Casey Container, Tamarisk Technologies, Imagin Molecular and Biomagnetics appeared in titles about development of biodegradable plastic. News of a global market study was listed within the first 20 records, and publication titles showed top journals such as Tissue Engineering, Biomaterials, Journal of Applied Polymer Science, Plastics Engineering, Polymer Engineering and Science and Plastics Technology. It was easy to further narrow to find in the results: "SodaStream announces the bio bottle — a biodegradable technology for SodaStream flavor packaging," March 8, 2011.

Digging deeper
Looking for emerging trends, a search focused in the Energy & Environment subject category for biodegradable plastic and (bottle or packag* or container) presented the opportunity to Narrow results by Conference Papers & Proceedings. Sorting by Date (most recent first) brought up citations and abstracts from the last several years with titles including "Quantitative Analysis of Biodegradable Polymers (PLLA & PCL) Thermal Bonding," "Polyactide Nanocomposites as a New Solution for Eco-Compatible Packaging" and "Effect of Nano Fillers in Hybrid Bio Degradable Thermoplastic Cornstarch Materials."

Business impact
Focusing on business and corporate aspects, a Change to Gale Group PROMT^® database and a search on biodegradable plastic and trends yielded articles about an upcoming forum focusing on rheology tools to advance material development and processing, commercial trends in polymers and additives, and opportunities and challenges in biobased and biodegradable plastics. News about global market reports and product development appeared from Research and Markets and Reportlinker. Other articles came from such journals as Plastics News, Chemistry and Industry and Plastics Engineering. And, a simple search on biodegradable bottle cut to the chase and surfaced an article from Plastics Technology titled "Four Key Markets Drive Advances," citing innovations and new products from North American processors, and "Biodegradable Bottles" from Beverage Industry focused on Redleaf Water, a company from British Columbia, that has produced biodegradable water bottles.

With just a few subject searches in ProQuest Dialog scientific content and business trade literature, this searcher uncovered just the information he set out to find, and it was all made simple with easy-to-use search tools incorporated into the ProQuest Dialog interface.

 

 April Highlights

Free File of the Month — World News Connection (WNC)

In today's interconnected global economy, it is more important than ever for businesses to be familiar with the different philosophies, world outlooks, and thinking processes of other peoples in order to be successful in the international arena. World News Connection (WNC) (File 985), a foreign news service compiled by Open Source Center (OSC) from the U.S. Government and produced by National Technical Information Service (NTIS), is just such a source.

Unique advantages to using WNC:

• 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 gray literature, which provide technical reports before they go to journals
• OSC expert analyses
• Local-language articles translated into English
• Hourly updating 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 but rather from a local point of view
• Most articles in full text
• Coverage of 130 of the world's 160 countries, including locations other news services don't cover from a local perspective, like Cuba and Iran
• Focus on significant socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, security and environmental issues and events.

As you can see, World News Connection provides truly unique information about countries around the world including those that may not be covered anywhere else. Review the overview of WNC and register for Finding Worldwide Business Intelligence and News on Dialog on April 6 and 20 to learn more about the database. Try File 985 in April for free up to $100 (either DialUnits or connect time; output and Alert costs are not included.) to expand your sources for global news!

 

World News Connection: Unique sources, local perspective, timely coverage, quick translations

Do you need to find information from local sources about a country like Egypt that is in political turmoil before sending your people there? Can you find out the local impact of a natural disaster, such as the tsunami that hit Japan in March and the resulting nuclear repercussions? These are only some of the issues covered by World News Connection (WNC) on Dialog.

Unique perspective and content
The international coverage found in File 985 spans a range of topics, including business and economics, crime, the environment, investment, health and medicine, humanitarian aid, military affairs, politics, science and technology, social issues and terrorism. Particularly effective in its coverage of local media sources, WNC provides users with the power to identify unique perspectives on happenings in a specific country or region. Because this database picks up non-U.S. news and translates it into English, it is one of the few databases available that allows users to gain the local or regional perspective of international events occurring in that specific area.

Disaster in Japan
A good example is the 9.0 earthquake, the resulting tsunami and the nuclear disaster in Japan. A sample search illustrates the scope of unique, related content on WNC.

Step 1: We'll conduct a search in the World News Connection Web version. We'll enter our search terms NUCLEAR POWER OR RADIATION in the Headlines box and limit to records dated 20110317.

Step 2: This simple search retrieves articles, translated into English if necessary, from such sources as Czech Happenings, Khom Chat Luek and Khao Sot (Thailand), Interfax, Yonhap (South Korea), The Telegraph Online (India). Sources such as these are otherwise unavailable in the United States.

Headlines from WNC articles emphasize health, economic and other concerns of nations globally:

• "Expert Notes Similar Israeli, Japanese Reactor Technologies, Warns of Breakdown" from Globes Online
• "Ministers Say Slovakia Not in Imminent Danger of Radioactivity From Japan" from TASR
• "South Korean Won Drops to Year's Low on Japan Nuclear Worries" from Korean Herald Online
• "Salt Rush in China Over Radiation Fears" from Xinhua
• "Lithuania at Greater Risk Than Latvia Due to Closeness to Would-Be Belarus N-Plant" from BNS
• "Taiwan Mulling Nuclear Safety Mechanism With China," from Central News Agency

If we run the same search on an Internet search engine, narrowing to the "past day" option to coincide with the WNC search, we see the top stories are from major sources available anywhere, such as The New York Times, CNN, Voice of America and the Wall Street Journal.

Updated multiple times, WNC provides timely, unique information. This is just one example.

Give it a try yourself
Follow the news on the American hikers held in Iran; see what economic problems in Greece or Ireland are having on other European countries; or learn how Arab nations are reacting to the turmoil in Libya.

Simplified Web interface
A simplified Web-based interface to World News Connection lets you get started immediately. WNC is available for subscription from Dialog, as a stand-alone service on the Web (wnc.dialog.com) or as an optional component of other services offered by Dialog, including Dialog^®-branded services and Dialog NewsRoom.

As one U.S. newspaper claims, "all the news that's fit to print" — and then some.

 

 Discover: Engineering & Technical Content Updates

2011 reloads completed on biomedical files

• ToxFile^® (File 156) is reloaded every year to include the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) revisions to the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH^®). The reload is complete, and ToxFile records containing MeSH descriptors now match the 2011 MEDLINE^® thesaurus.

• Each year, Elsevier provides an updated version of the the Embase^® EMTREE thesaurus. The 2011 version is now available in Embase^® and Embase^® Classic (Files 72, 73, 972 and 772).

 

 Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

CLAIMS databases reload with new Green Technology Indexing

CLAIMS^®/U.S. Patents databases (Files 340, 341, 942) have been updated with all of the 2010 reload enhancements through July 29, 2010. This 2010 release includes the following enhancements:

• Complete assignee name changes
• Probable Assignees (aka pre-issue assignments, with additional value included from IFI)
• U.S. Classification changes
• IPC revisions and C.A. Reference Numbers for 2001-2010 granted patent publications
• Complete indexing changes (including all Collection terms and new Green Technology Indexing)
  Growth in green technologies has fueled interest in new terminology to help identify key patents, and many of IFI's new terms cover energy and environmental concepts. More than 260 new terms have been added and posted to more than 6,000 documents. New terms recently added include:
• Renewable chemicals, term # 11297
• Biofuels/hydrocarbon/ for searching renewable diesel and biogasoline, term # 11057
• New collection term (Therapeutic area/CT/) with 233,595 postings

 

Keeping an eye on future technology: Find new players with DWPI and PCI

Using Derwent World Patent Index^® (DWPI^SM) (File 351) and Derwent Patent Citation Index^® (DPCI^SM) (File 342) together can help you find new players and technologies in a given space. Take a look below to see how you can use these files to find exactly what you are looking for, just as we did in this example dealing with lane deviation.

Here are the steps:

B 351	Begin File 351
S S1 AND PY=2010:2011/PB	Search keywords and classification for Lane Deviation patents and narrow to recent patents from 2010-2011 for DWPI Basics.
MAP AX	Map the DWPI accession numbers
RANK PANAME	RANK the patent assignee name
B 342	Begin 342
EX TD471:EX TD472	Execute the mapped numbers
S S1 AND S2	Combine sets
RANK COCGNAME	RANK Citing patent assignee name

Compare the DWPI rank to the rank from DPCI to find new players. In the RANK PANAME results Toyota was the top assignee. RANKing the Citing patent assignee name helps you find new organizations that are inventing in the same technologies. Additional players in the lane deviation field are highlighted.

RANK No.  Items  Term
--------  -----  ----
    1      981   DONNELLY CORP
    2      387   SCHOFIELD K
    3      340   GENTEX CORP
    4      338   BOSCH GMBH ROBERT
    5      241   MARVELL INT LTD
    6      202   DAIMLERCHRYSLER AG
    7      181   VOLKSWAGEN AG
    8      168   NISSAN MOTOR CO LTD

Exit the RANK list and look at new patent records. In this search we're looking for Donnelly Corp. citing top assignee Toyota (S3 in previous results).

?s co=donnelly/cg and s3 and pa=toyota 
            5733  CO=DONNELLY/CG
            1793  S3
      S4     983  CO=DONNELLY/CG AND S3

Now you can TYPE records with Donnelly Corp. as the Citing Patent and select a record such as patent US 7771061 representing the new related technology from Donnelly Corp.

 

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

Speaking on different planes
After spending a long time on the phone with a travel agent booking an involved airline trip, I was asked by the agent, "Can you spell your name?" Of course, thinking through the question, I realized it was of the yes or no type, so I replied very quickly and proudly, "Yes, I can," as I have been able to spell my own name since I was very young. The agent responded by being very quiet. I thought perhaps not only was she overly-impressed at my innate abilities, but also obviously was rendered speechless. Then, she repeated the question and I repeated my answer. Of course, at this point, she got upset, and I realized maybe there was more to our levels of understanding I did not see.

Yes, maybe I am overly-literal and should have considered the total scope of a travel agent's services would include actually having the correct spelling of my name for ticketing purposes. And, in the context of booking flights, while the question could have been phrased better, I should have looked at the totality of the circumstances to actually answer the implied question. Such are the problems of focusing on individual points of speech that can vary the meaning of what is being described.

Different parts of a patent relay different information based upon the intent of the patent drafter. The title is quite often a quick description that will just barely satisfy the examiner's criticism, but the claims depend upon the context of the entire document. Claims, being the legal part of the document, outline the legal metes and bounds of the invention the applicant is trying to protect, and as such have to be taken in context with the description of the invention found in the rest of the patent (especially in the section of the patent titled, "Detailed Description of the Invention" — yes, some of us need such section headings so we don't misinterpret some things too literally!).

An item cannot be mentioned for the first time in the claims as it must have been mentioned elsewhere in the document or else that claim can be rejected as having no antecedent basis. This is why many practitioners draft the claims first, and then copy them into the abstract and finally, break the longish claim language into shorter sentences. This way, the practitioners are guaranteed every word in the claims will have an antecedent basis. And, this is also why some abstracts are really difficult to read. Just look for the word, "said" (a legalese term meaning, "the") in the abstract field, and you will locate more than 400,000 abstracts that were apparently just lifted from the claims.

I am "d-u-n" dun with this search; I like to spell things out to make sure no one is confused
The inventor may be on a different plane (plain) than the assignee, examiner, reader and searcher.

So, psych out the inventor AND the patent drafter. What are they trying to say? A significant patent may have an insignificant title and abstract.

For example, US 5,273,995, one of the significant patents for the creation of Lipitor (currently the single drug with the most sales in the world at over US$12 billion/year) is titled with just the scientific name of the drug (I'll spare you the details but there is a lot of what looks like chickenwire). The fact this drug can be used for lowering cholesterol does not appear until five paragraphs into the specification under the section titled, "Summary of the Invention," where the word "hypocholesterolemic" appears. Is this language arcane, obfuscatory, misleading...or proper? A search in the title or abstract fields for words like LOWERING AND CHOLESTEROL would have missed this essential patent.

Another "Selden" crisis
Even the infamous Selden patent (US 549,160) of 1895 was titled simply "Road Engine," though the usage of the word "Engine" is closer in meaning to a locomotive device than it is to a locomotive power source. This patent was responsible for many automobile manufacturers being forced to buy a license in the form of a plate displayed on an automobile stating the vehicle was made under license, even though the patent covered a device closer to a turbine engine than to a typical automobile engine. The Selden plates are now highly collectible, an unanticipated new use! Here, searching by class codes and using search terms in the full text, followed by visually checking the drawings of automobile-like carriages, helps to identify the right patent.

Of course, who could have guessed that Hedy Lamarr's 1942 patent titled "Secret Communication Device" (US 2,292,387) would become the basis for a large segment of non-secret communications in the form of a cell phone standard? Here, future citations help to identify the critical patent because the final use of the technology can be found by the eventual developers of cell phone communications.

So, how do you know when you have found the right patent that answers the question posed by the search request? Do check the title and abstract, but also consider the drawings, the class codes, the examples in the specification, the citations and the claims. Just recall the abstracts can be redundant with the claims. And sometimes the title of a patent may not answer the question you were asked, but could still be the right patent. Again, consider the totality of the question in light of the patents found as there may be some interpretation necessary. Indeed, future citations may be the best indication of the eventual use of the invention, but that may be a future column. And, if I do write one on future citations, I'll now be able to self-cite this column. I'll just have to ensure I can spell my own name correctly — a skill I have hopefully mastered.

 

 Learn about ProQuest

Pictures illustrate the core of findings — and ProQuest gives you the tools to find them

Certain subject categories in the all-new ProQuest Platform provide Deep Indexing, the power to search for figures and tables. Once you give it a try, you'll find that deep indexing is an efficient, precise and relevant way to get the picture that explains the findings.

For example, if you subscribe to EconLit in the business category or to databases in the Health & Medicine or Science & Technology areas, you'll find links to Find related figures & tables available on the Results page after a Basic Search. These objects are most often invisible in traditional and full-text searching.

You can also link to a Figures & Tables Search, which opens up a dedicated search form to find charts, graphs, illustrations, photographs and maps — an innovative approach to online searching. A Figures & Tables Search lets you discover indexed — apart from the documents in which they were published — visual data representations.

The Figures & Tables Search Results page lists summary information for all the tables and other figures that match your search criteria. Both the matching items and also any documents that include figures and tables are included in the list.

A search for (renewable or sustainable) energy in the Science & Technical category, followed by Search within for solar or photovoltaic or pv, led to a link on the Results page to Find related figures & tables. When the searcher clicked this link, ProQuest displayed records with links to the images and connections to the articles that contained the images.

Alternatively, when a searcher clicked on Figures & Tables at the top of the page under the subject name, she found a search form much like the Advanced Search form, with many more options. The searcher started out in the Figures & Tables Search form with the goal of finding only records with figures & tables. ProQuest supplied check boxes for her to specify types of images and gave the ability to set a date range up front. If she wished, she could limit to full-size images.

Note: Check the latest issue of ProQuest's A Platform of Innovation newsletter highlighting the new ProQuest platform and features, comments and training on ProQuest Dialog. Subscribe now!