If you wish to change your password this can be done after logging in by navigating to the “Menu” tab on the toolbar and selecting “Change password”, as shown below:


You will then be prompted to enter a new password of your choice and to confirm it in the second box. Selecting the orange button will change your password to the text entered.

You can currently save 10,000 records to a single PatBase folder.

Information on how we construct our families, and the criteria required for a document to be placed within a PatBase family, can be found here: "PatBase Family Description"

To change your display settings, go to “Menu” on the floating toolbar and select “Display/search options”.

Here you can select the default fields to interrogate with a keyword search, the default display format, the default sorting order and additional options such as showing the dead/alive tags for family members, viewing simple or complex families, and showing the original Non-Latin characters for non-Latin inventors and assignee’s.

You can also create your own custom display formats by clicking the grey “Define Custom Display Format” button at the top right of the pane.

Don’t Panic! Simply log out of your ID without conducting any searches and return to the login screen. Ensure that you check the continue last session box and log back in to the system. Your search history should be restored.

If you have already conducted a search after logging in without clicking the continue check box please contact support@minesoft.com as soon as possible stating your user ID and the time that the event occurred.

Please note: the longer it takes to inform the support team that your search history has been erased, the less likely it is that we will be able to recover your data.

The SC command will search the CPC, IPC, USPC, Locarno and the JP classifications systems for the query input after the “=” to find any relevant hits.

As long as the search query is contained within at least one of the mentioned classification systems PatBase will return a hit for any families matching the query.

E.g. an SC=(B60G17) search will find families with the JP F-index code of B60G17 which contain no other documents from other jurisdictions, while a CPC or IPC=(B60G17) would miss these families as the JP F-index is not searched with the IPC= or IPC=.

Latin and non-Latin text are indexed together in PatBase, so a non-Latin assignee name search can be run as a normal assignee search, e.g. PA=(华为)

Chemical names frequently contain punctuation such as brackets, commas and hyphens. To clarify that these are not to be interpreted as operators, using quotes is recommended e.g. FT=2-Amino-2-[2-(4-octylphenyl)ethyl]propane-1,3-diol. Quotes are required if the option that interprets ,-+ as Boolean operators is in use.

Recall on chemical names can often be boosted by liberal use of the underscore operator. Frequently where a hyphen can occur in a chemical name it would also be reasonable for there to be a space or no delimitation. An underscore matches either a punctuation character or no punctuation. For example, alkylamino_pyrimidine will match any of: alkylamino-pyrimidine, alkylaminopyrimidine or alkylamino pyrimidine.

When searching numbers as text characters in PatBase it is necessary to enclose them in quotation marks. This informs the system that you are looking for the number in the text, not attempting to recall the search line of the same number into your query:

“1” and “2” will search for the numbers 1 and 2 in the default text area of every document in the database, returning as hits any documents that contain both 1 and 2 in the selected default field. Alternatively, you can place quotation marks around the entire phrase, e.g. TAC=(“Type 2 diabetes”)

On the other hand, (1 and 2) will combine your search step 1 with your search step 2 and return any results that match both sets of criteria.

Any text fields can be suffixed with a two letter language code (LC). For example TAC_DE searches across the title, abstract and claims of German text. ATAC_LC fields additionally cover machine translated text that originally was in the given language. This functionality can be helpful where the same word means different things in different languages. For instance, TI=(gift) vs TI_DE=(gift) – Gift in German means poison! The language codes codes follow the ISO 639-1 standard, with CN, JP, KR additionally being allowed for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

You can use the Country and publication codes CC= (Publication Country) or PRC= (Priority Country) to filter your search results.

You can also change the display format of your search (by default you will see the US publication first, where available).

You can go to Menu > custom display formats and choose the fields you want to display and add a country display preference. You can give a name to this display format and you will be able to select it when doing an export.

Relevance sorting is determined by considering how many of your search terms occur in a match, how many times the search term occurs (term frequency) and how many times the search term occurs across all patents (document frequency). This sort of metric is commonly referred to as TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency). The scoring is applicable to all fields, not just key word searches e.g. a search for a common or an uncommon classification will consider those families with the uncommon classification to be more relevant than one with just the common classification, although a family with both would be considered even more relevant.

There is a command line function to jump to and view a specific range of families within a result set.

V Sn1 classic n2-n3

Where:
Sn1=the search step number you wish to view results from
N2=the first family record from the set you wish to view within your range
N3=the last family record within the set you wish to view within your range
Classic= the display format you wish to use can be replaced by any other display format name including “custom” (this will only work with the first custom display format and not those named custom 1-4)

For example, if the search step 4 contains 100 results, to view results 95-100 in the bibliographic view, enter: V S4 biblio 95-100. It is not necessary to include e.g. classic or biblio, if nothing is included, the records will be displayed in your default record display format. E.g.:

V S5 51-100

Will display records 51 through to 100 from search number 5 in your default record display format.

Entering this command will jump to the result range and view specified.

If performing an XML, CSV, RIS, MHT, or Excel format export then you would need to include the “family information” field in your export.

If completing a Word, RTF, PDF, or HTML format export then the Classic, Full, Bibliographic, or Family Table formats will include this information.

This sort of restriction is only possible for the following formats: XML, CSV, RIS, MHT, or Excel/XLSX.

After selecting one of the above formats select to complete your export at a publication level and scroll down below the field selection boxes to the publication filter.

Here you can specify whether to include:

• All publications from all countries within your result set


• Publications only from a specified range of countries (controlled by entering the country codes of the countries of interest) with the option to select grants only if available


• Only one publication per family with the option for the document to be a grant if one is available. This option includes a country preference filter, controlled by entering the country codes of preference – if none of the selected is available then the first English-language publication will be selected


• To export selected family members only (publications that have been manually selected by the user by checking the tick box next to the publication when viewing the family table)

Our Fair use policy limits the total number of documents that can be exported from a user ID to 50,000/day or 250,000/month. An offline export will not complete if the total number of documents exported including the current request exceeds either of these limits.

The daily quota is re-set every 24 hours, and the monthly quota on the 1st of every month.

If you have reached your limit, please contact Minesoft at support@minesoft.com and we will do our best to accommodate your request, either by completing the export ourselves and forwarding your results or temporarily raising your quota.

Please note: users that frequently make such requests may be asked to pay an additional surcharge.

To complete a PDF or word report-style export select the format you wish to conduct the export in eg: PDF and, after clicking through to the next screen, select “Custom Export” (the last option in the display format list).

After clicking continue you will be taken to a field selection box where you can choose the fields you wish to include in your report, including custom user fields should your PatBase domain have these enabled and in use.

You can also control the country display preference and whether to preferentially select granted publications if a grant is available at this stage.

The system will remember your field selection the next time you initiate an export, however, if you change the field selection the previous schema will be replaced with the new fields chosen.

When sharing data with colleagues or clients you have a number of options when using PatBase:

a) Publish a result set
You can Send the results of a search directly to a colleague from within the system by clicking “more” against the search line and clicking “Publish/Send results” from the “More Options” table, on the right-hand side of your screen. You will be prompted to name your search and then enter the recipients and the email address you wish to send from, along with an accompanying message.

Your colleague will receive a link along with your message. They have the option of viewing the results in PatBase or PatBase Express if they have access to those systems, or in the PatBase folder viewer if they do not. The folder viewer contains the bibliographic data on the family, a snapshot analytics function on the sent result set, and the ability to export the results as a PDF. The link will remain active for 6 months.

b) Share a folder
Folders can be published in the same way that a search set can be. Mouse over the “Folder” tab and select “My saved folders” to open the folder you wish to publish. With the folder open, hover over the “Folder” tab again (the tab will be renamed to the name of the folder you selected) and click “Publish”.

To share a folder, mouse over the “Folder” tab and open your saved folders: you can now either open the chosen folder and share it by mousing over the folder tab again and selecting “Share”, or simply navigate to your saved folders and click the “Share” option against the folder(s) of choice. This will make the folder available to users on the same PatBase domain as you. The user sharing their folder can elect whether they wish to give only read access to the folder, or read-write, allowing other users to add documents to the folder or add or edit existing notes placed against any documents in the folder etc.

Citation Explorer makes it simple and easy to run a search on the citations marked against your reference family.

Within the left-hand scroll table in your Citation Explorer session you will see 3 drop-down sections.

The black section titled “family members” contains all documents held within the family upon which the Citation Explorer session was run:


The second and third sections, in red and blue and titled “Backwards” and “Forwards” respectively, cover the citations that are listed against the currently viewed family.

(NB: a newer family may not contain forwards citations data if no documents currently in the database are marked as having cited the currently viewed family.)
(NB: newer families may not contain forwards citation data as they might not have been cited yet)

to view one or more of the backwards or forwards citations in PatBase, click the downward arrow to open up the relevant drop-down:


Check the documents of interest using the tick-boxes provided.

Once you have made your selection, click the PatBase icon as shown below, to run a PatBase search on your selection.


(Please note: it is not currently possible to search both forwards and backwards citations simultaneously. Instead follow the steps above for the backwards citations and then repeat for the forwards citations to receive two search lines, one for each search. These can be combined using Boolean operators)

In this example we will be sharing the legal status timeline for a family, however this process will work with the table, reassignment and priority map views as well.

First open the Legal Information Browser for the family of interest, and navigate to the screen you wish to share:



Next click the additional options symbol as shown in the screenshot below to access a dropdown list of the various formats in which you can export the date in the current view.



The file formats available will change depending on the data being viewed: for example the excel file format is available as an option when viewing the legal status table information but not when viewing the timeline.

You also have the option with all views to either generate a link which you can host yourself or send directly to a colleague or an email option which will open a new email message and automatically populate it with a link and a short message:

To create or edit custom groups, select “Settings” on the menu on the left-hand side of the page, and then click “Groups” on the secondary drop-down menu. Here you will be able to follow the links to edit your groups in the Grouping App. Alternatively, you can access the Grouping App from the Chart Settings.


Alternatively create/edit the groups from the Chart Settings on graphs that contain assignee, jurisdiction, classifications, inventors or agents.

It’s possible to add a company logo to your Analytics and to add your name and your company name from the Settings.


You could also adjust the colours used in the charts and graphs under “Styles” to align more closely with your company colours.

The Data Locator tool extracts the data for the selected datapoint of interest to reveal relevant patent numbers. Users can easily copy the full list of numbers or export all numbers in CSV format. In addition, users can search this data in PatBase, run an instant analysis or view the details of the documents that make up this data point.

To access the Data Locator tool:

• Click on the blue, red or orange figure box displayed on the dashboard page
• Click on chart data when viewing analysis charts
• Click on a datapoint cell in the table when viewing the raw data behind a chart

For the majority of your analysis there is no sampling applied. However, due to amount of data being analysed, sampling is applied to Keyword Clustering if there are more than 10,000 families, to Keyword Landscape if there are more than 1,000 families and Citation Networks if there are more than 500 families.

To save or export your charts go to Chart and navigate to the “Share and Download” tab.


From here you can generate a share link, that will produce a URL that will allow you to share the chart with colleagues.

You also have the option to save the chart as a PNG, PDF, or JPG file, as well as printing directly.

To export your data, select the “Data” button and scroll to the bottom of the table. As shown in the figure below you have multiple options on how to export this data.


You can export as Excel, XML, CSV, TSV, HTML, JSON, and PDF files.