PatBasics: An Introduction to PatBase

PatBasics - View

Viewing results in PatBase





  • On the Search History page, there are 3 viewing options, “View, “Browse” and “Hits”.

  • Before jumping straight into viewing records, a search can be refined and filtered using Optimise. The search can be filtered by Company, Technology, Publication Date or Country using the expandable categories.

  • When viewing search results, you have the option to gather more information about a particular invention:

    • View the mosaic of images
    • Select the link to “Family Explorer” to reveal details about an individual publication
    • Review the legal status information in the national register offices using the Register links
    • Open up the PDF document

  • The family bar has access to all of the advanced options:

    • Similar - finds similar patents based on the title and abstract, claims, description, images (US only), citations, classifications, and for non-patent literature
    • Translate - Select your language of choice to translate the available text
    • Full text - A new pop up window will display the full text. In the left-hand column is a list of all the full text documents available for the selected patent family
    • Status - A legal status table will be displayed in a new window, showing all the INPADOC PRS legal events, national patent office data and colour coded legal status groups
    • Citations - Opens Citation Explorer, track the forward and backward citations of the selected family

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I search by language?
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.
How is the sorting by relevance order determined?
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.
How do I jump to a specific set of documents within a result set without clicking through my results to reach them?
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.