Access to and Searching Non-Patent Literature:
On-Line Scientific and Technical Journals
Stanley Kowalski
Franklin Pierce Center for Intellectual Property
UNH School of Law
With the emergence of a knowledge
based economy, more and more
research teams, academic or industrial,
produce results which can be both
published in academic journals and
patented.
Non-Patent Literature
Scientific journals articles
Book chapters
Conference papers
Conference
Proceedings
Academic
Journals
Books
Monographs
Non
Patent
Literature
Thesis
Technical
Reports
(NPL)
Trade
Journals
Non Patent
Literature
Sources
Encyclopedias
Dictionary
Conference
Proceedings
Journals
Secondary Publishers
INSPEC, CAS,
COMPDX, BIOSIS,
MEDLINE, FSTA
Books, Thesis,
Technical
reports,
Monographs
Company
Disclosures
Standards
Non Patent
Literature
Sources
Encyclopedia
Dictionaries
Patent Literature Databases
Link
Search Engine
or Database
Access
Patent Lens
Public
www.patentlens.net/daisy/patentlens/patentlens.html
United States
Patent &
Trademark
Office (Patents)
Public
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
Google Patents
Public
http://www.google.com/patents
Scirus
Public
http://scirus.com/
Patent Storm
Public
http://www.patentstorm.us/
Searches Provided
Full Text vs.
Abstracts
Full text of over 8 million patents
and applications. Updated weekly
with information from WIPO,
USPTO, EPO and IP Australia.
Can view in full
text mode or PDF
mode.
Searches US Patents and
Published Patent Applications.
Full text, image is
problematic. No
PDF.
Free database covering the entire
collection of patents made
available by the USPTO.
Abstracts, full text
and PDF.
Approx. 450 million scientific
items.
Abstracts, full text
and PDF when
available.
U. S. Patents
Patent Applications
Abstracts, full text
and PDF
(clickable
features)
Non Patent Literature Database
Search Engine or Database
Access
Link
Searches Provided
Full Text
vs.
Abstracts
PubMed Central (PMC)
Public
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
Free access archive of
complete collection of
biomedical and life sciences
journal articles from NIH’s
National Center for
Biotechnology information.
Abstracts and links
to full text when
available.
PubMed/ Medline
Public
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
Free access archive of
biomedical literature and is
also useful when search
topic may be more general
science or chemistry.
Abstracts and links
to full text when
available.
Medline Plus
Public
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/
Contains carefully selected
links to web resources with
health information on > 740
topics and > 1350
organizations.
Abstracts and links
to full text when
available.
Non Patent Literature Database
Search Engine or
Database
Access
Link
Searches Provided
Full Text
vs.
Abstracts
MeSH – Medical
Subject Headings
Public
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html
A listing of U S National Library
of Medicine’s controlled
vocabulary for indexing articles
for MEDLINE/PubMed.
When available
Google Scholar
Public
http://scholar.google.com/
Free database for broad search
for scholarly publications.
Abstracts and links to
full text when available
NTIS (National
Technical
Information Service)
Public
http://ntis.gov/
Largest central resource for
government-funded scientific,
technical, engineering,
biotechnology, the environment,
health & safety, and business
related information.
Seems to provide
abstracts only.
TESS – Trademark
electronic search
system
Public
http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm
TESS contains more than 4
million pending, registered and
dead federal trademarks.
N/A
Publications and patents as information supports have many analogous
features for example:
author/inventor
institution/assignee
bibliographic referencing/patent system referencing
bibliometric classification/official classification
abstract
full text
reference to scientific literature/reference to patent or non-patent
literature, etc.
For Example, note the
congruence of inventors and
authors, and published and
patented technologies in the
following example of HIV
vaccine technology:
DNA Vaccination with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 SF162DV2
Envelope Elicits Immune Responses That Offer Partial Protection from
Simian/Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection to CD81 T-Cell-Depleted
Rhesus Macaques
JOURNAL OF VIROLOGY, Feb. 2001, p. 1547–1550
S. CHERPELIS,1 I. SHRIVASTAVA,2 A. GETTIE,1,3 X. JIN,1 D. D. HO,1
S. W. BARNETT,2 AND L. STAMATATOS1*
Note the congruence between
assignee/institution and
inventor/author and technology
covered in the following journal
publication and patent:
Glucose Polyester Biosynthesis.
Purification and Characterization of a Glucose
Acyltransferase
Alice X. Li, Nancy Eannetta, Gurdev S.
Ghangas, and John C. Steffens
Department of Plant Breeding, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York 14853
Plant Physiology, October 1999, Vol. 121, pp. 453–460,
www.plantphysiol.org
However, there are
important caveats!
Patent information may not
always be used as source for
scientific technical information;
in addition information disclosed
in patents does not always
appear in non-patent literature
later.
Methods and results published in academic journals must be
informative enough firstly to convince referees, secondly to attract a
large scope of potential users and citers as soon as possible.
A patent, however, is both a legal document and a piece of technical
literature. This shapes well known peculiarities of patent documents;
for example, poorly informative original titles.
Publications are a good
representation of the contents of
science.
Patents (or kindred IPR forms) collect
a large part of technological
information, even though the patent
combines several functions.
One can generally expect,
therefore, different patterns of
information disclosure in
scientific publications and
patents.
Therefore, these two sources of
information are neither exclusive nor
inclusive, but rather complimentary.
When doing research, it is important to
research both patent and non-patent
literature, regardless of the intent, i.e.,
whether for prior art searching, freedom
to operate analysis or patent invalidation
research.
Some examples of web-based
non-patent literature
resources
Non-Patent Literature (examples)
Publishers’ own websites:
Found through PubMed, LinkOut or through direct searching;
British Library
http://www.bl.uk/services/document/dsc.html;
CAS Document Detective Service
http://www.cas.org/Support/dds.html
Non-Patent Literature (examples)
Purdue Univ. Tech. Info Service
http://www.tis.purdue.edu/html/index.html
U. Minn. Biomedical Info. Service
http://www.biomed.lib.umn.edu/bis/bismain.html
A research university library near you!
Internet Resources (examples)
Meta Search Engines
- Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.com/
- Scirus: http://www.scirus.com
- Entrez:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Entrez
Citation Tracking
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
However, it is crucial to remember
that current search engines may still
largely ignore the contents of the
Library of Congress, the US Patent
and Trademark database, newspaper
archives, and many other valuable
sources of information because their
contents are not “crawlable”.
Until recently, the multidisciplinary data
sources for patents and publications were
separated. The trend today is towards an
integration of knowledge information
whatever the nature. A new sign perhaps is
the connection between ISI publications
and Derwent patents by navigation along
the citation linkages. The navigation
between documents along a lexical
connection is also likely to expand.
Patent and non-patent literature
are different but also
complimentary. Searching both will
inform as to the technologies
considered, the inventors and their
respective assignees.
References used for this presentation
Robert J. W. Tijssen Handbook of Quantitative Science and
Technology Research, 695-715
Patent and Literature Search Tools (rev. April 2008) JHU
Jeffrey J. Berns AALL Annual Meeting and Conference, 2005 San
Antonic
CGIAR Centre publications as Prior art
Elise Bassecoulard Handbook of Quantitative Science and
Technology Research, 665-694
Mervyn Bregonje World Patent Information; Dec 2005, Vol. 27 Issue
4, p309-315, 7p
European Patent Office, The Hague Search Matters 2009