IMPORTANCE OF PRIOR ART SEARCH
Pitch Scientific has the acquired skill of conducting a detailed prior art search and then provide a report specially customized to the end user. Such reports were well received by the requesters who have given their appreciation in a number of different ways- including pleasing words of praise as well as repeating requests for more studies.
Keywords based search for prior art search service in patents database involves the appropriate use of keywords and all possible synonyms and representations of the keywords. An important further feature of keywords search includes the choice of text field in which the keywords are to be searched.
Typical patent contents include the front page, the description or specification and the claims. Front page include several vital information such as: publication number, dates including filing date, publication date and grant date, along with inventors and assignee/ applicant’s name, abstract, and often a typical drawing that is considered illustrative of the invention.
Hence, a typical patent search professional has the options of searching in any of these fields individually or in combination. The nature of the search being conducted will largely determine the choice of the fields of search. To be able to make a judicious choice, the searcher has to understand the role of the various sections of the patent.
Claims are considered to be the heart of a patent, as it is the enforceable portion against potential threats. Description section, as the name suggests, describes the invention in greater detail. From a different perspective, the description section is used by a patent drafter to enable the claims, which means it is used to define the terms used in the claims, and/or explain the concepts in detail. Abstract provides a short description of the distinguishing feature of the invention, while title gives a snapshot of the invention.
Therefore, from the aforementioned, it becomes obvious to the searcher that if one wishes to identify all patents that are enforceable for a given concept, then the search for the concepts has to be conducted in the claims section. On the other hand, if the search is meant to identify all the patents that disclose some features of interest, then the search has to be extended to all the sections without any limitation.
Quite often, a search in all sections of the patents can result in a large number of results that allows for a meaningful analysis. In such situations, one useful technique to limit the results would be to search within the title, abstract or claims. The difference in the number of hits when the field of search is changed from all sections to only claims, title and abstract can be quite vast, sometimes as much as a 1/3rd drop in the number of hits. The relevance of the hits also sometimes improves by limiting to these fields of search.
The flip side of the above situation is that by searching in the title, abstract or claims, it is also possible that very relevant results may be missed out. Depending on the kind of search conducted, the number of such relevant results could be a few or many. Regardless of the number of hits, the simple fact of the matter is that these are relevant hits and in principle, they cannot be ignored. This means that a search in the description also needs to be performed.
Hence, the searcher has to be very judicious in choosing or eliminating search fields for a particular search project. The trick is to find the balance between getting few very relevant hits with the risk of losing out on relevant hits versus sifting through a large data set enduring several irrelevant hits to identify the most relevant ones. The ability to find this balance quickly and efficiently distinguishes the good searcher from the novice in the field.
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