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October 2008

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Trademarks from China Enhance the Dialog Trademark Collection

TRADEMARKSCAN^®— CHINA (File 651) joins the robust collection of trademark databases on Dialog. File 651 contains over 4.5 million records and 2.6 million images covering information about unpublished and published trademark applications and registrations with SIPO (State Intellectual Property Office for the People's Republic of China) from 1950 forward, as published in Shangbiao Gonggao, the China Trademark Gazette.

File 651 follows the design of existing trademark files on Dialog. Trademark names are transliterated, and current status and goods and services are in English. The Trademark Cross Reference (XT=) provides either the common or the English name of the mark, where available, such as "tsingtao" for the mark "tsingtao qingdao pijiu," or "golden chicken" for the mark "jinji." Goods and Services are subclass descriptions and may not accurately reflect the exact goods. Inactive trademarks for the last three years are retained. Images represent the original graphical filing and are primarily in black-and-white with some in colors. The file updates weekly.

For additional information about TRADEMARKSCAN—China, see the Bluesheet or HELP NEWS 651.

What’s New with Dialog: Customer Training and Documentation

So many new things are happening at Dialog, and training and documentation improvements are no exception. A series of Update meetings were held in September and early October to inform you about new directions at Dialog, as well as to provide training sessions by Dialog experts. Additionally, documentation is being updated to reflect new features of Dialog products and other enhancements. Plans for training include: a mix of regional sessions with Dialog experts; instructor-led "short courses" via the web; and courses you can take at your own pace in your own time.

We are committed to continuing to provide you with the excellent training you have come to expect from Dialog, as well as to employing new technologies to bring you training in formats that best meet your search and learning needs.

New Database Selection Guides for Searching Dialog and DataStar

Two new publications—the Dialog^® Database Selection Guide and the DataStar^® Database Selection Guide—will help you to select appropriate databases for your searches. The Guides contain a listing of DIALINDEX^®/OneSearch^® categories and CROS categories respectively. In addition, step-by-step examples illustrate how to search DIALINDEX and use CROS on DataStarWeb. Download these valuable Guides in PDF format from the Dialog website today!

Sign up now for the new quarterly Training Newsletter and the monthly Chronolog^® to stay informed of new training courses, search tips, expert insights and more.

 Sci-Tech Content Updates

Ei Compendex Reload on Dialog Adds Indexing and Display Tag Changes

Ei Compendex^® (File 8,278,288,988) covers 190 engineering disciplines and is an indispensable tool for professionals, faculty and students. With over 10 million records from more than 5,600 scholarly journals, trade magazines and conference proceedings, Compendex is the most comprehensive interdisciplinary literature database available to engineers. In the 2008 reload, several new indexes and other enhancements were added to Compendex.

• A new issue title field is included in the /TI, Title index and display tag (TI). This field contains the issue title of the journal, book, conference proceeding or report ("source") in which the document was published.

The corresponding author (AU=), a phrase-indexed field, is included as a separate subfield at the beginning of the word-indexed affiliation field (CS=). The author email address is also included as a display code. Several new search and display fields have been added including publication date (PD=,PD), publisher (PU=,PU), and record type for abstract and citation (RT=,RT), among others.

To review all field changes, check the Bluesheet. To view changes for Compendex (COMP) on DataStar, reloaded in August, see the Datasheet.

 Business & News Content Updates

McGraw-Hill Provides Comprehensive News and Financial Coverage

Did you know that you can get editorial coverage from McGraw-Hill Companies Publications Online (File 624) on just about any topic that affects business? Just enter your search terms on a recent hot topic and you will find the subject covered in a wide variety of McGraw-Hill’s leading magazines and newsletters.

Your search combines BusinessWeek’s domestic and international coverage of vital business news and analyses about companies, investing, the economy, technology, innovation, management, small business and more, with vertical industry coverage of topics like those published by McGraw-Hill’s Aviation Week, Construction, and Platts Energy publishing groups. You benefit from searching across more than 55 McGraw-Hill publications, giving you comprehensive coverage on the same topic, covered from a variety of industry perspectives.

For an example of BusinessWeek's "horizontal" coverage of the business world and the vertical industry coverage of the other McGraw-Hill publications in File 624, we can look at results from the search query “credit()crunch.” This search strategy finds stories from BusinessWeek magazine, as well as BusinessWeek Online (web-only stories), Power Markets Week, Engineering News-Record, Platts International Coal Report, The Weekly of Business Aviation, Energy Economist, Platts International Petrochemical Report, Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, Business & Commercial Aviation, Megawatt Daily, Energy Trader, Platts Oilgram News, and many more McGraw-Hill publications. For one topic, you get a range of editorial perspectives all from one comprehensive database of McGraw-Hill publications, some archived as far back as 1975.

 Intellectual Property Content Updates

A Proximal and a Distal Point
by Ron Kaminecki, MS, JD

Welcome to the revitalized Chronolog. Back when the publication was printed on paper, I recall reading each edition, and I always learned something new.  I have been asked to contribute a periodic column on intellectual property to replace the old IP e-newsletter.  I’ll be looking for feedback directly from you and would love to address some of the questions that I am presented with over time.  I do sterilize the items to protect the innocent.

Two questions I receive often are “why are there two U.S. patent files and which is the best one to search?”  The answer is not a simple one, as each has features that the other doesn’t.  For example, the U.S. Patents Fulltext database (File 654) comes to us from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and has the complete patent. CLAIMS^®/U.S. Patents (File 340) comes to us from the folks at IFI CLAIMS after they add a lot of data not found in the original text. A portion of the information IFI CLAIMS provides in CLAIMS^®/Current Patent Legal Status (File 123), especially reassignment data, is also put into File 654, although it is slightly delayed. True, the IFI CLAIMS file does not have the fulltext; it does, however, feature at least the front page information and the claims, and does have coverage of chemical patents back to 1950. This file has been enhanced with:

• Additional enhanced titles
• Standardized assignee names and assignee numbers
• 96,000 recovered chemical patents from 1971-1973 not covered by other files
• Reclassified U.S. class codes to reflect the most recent coding, including the re-indexing of all U.S. patents back to 1950 with the latest (8th edition) International Patent Classification Codes
• Post-issuance information including reassignments, reexaminations, disclaimers, and extensions
• Merged published applications with issued patents, a real convenience, with various fields tagged with the A or B Kind code of the document from which they were originally derived
• Probable assignees, in which the folks at IFI CLAIMS have found almost 90 percent of all the eventual assignees.  Published applications usually don't show an assignee, and the probable assignee data added in File 340 can't be found in any other file on Dialog. (These are grouped under the patent assignee code PA= and also by themselves as PS=)
• An estimation of when the issued patent may expire under normal circumstances
• Additional indexing, especially for chemical information
• Special indexing of business method patents since 2001
• More features, including a nice chart of the “begats,” as in this application begat that divisional, which begat a continuation-in-part, etc.

Searchers report that if they are looking for a common term that could be misinterpreted they prefer the IFI CLAIMS file because the basic index covers the title, abstract and claims and not the entire specification where the common term could overload the retrieval with casual mentions of the search term.  Thus, while the search may retrieve fewer hits, the retrieval tends to have a higher percentage of good hits versus bad—great for quickly locating a few pieces of prior art without having to wade through many extraneous hits.

I do hope to see you at the PIUG 2008 Northeast Conference post-conference meeting, “What’s Going on at Dialog: the Patent Searcher’s Edition” being held by Dialog from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m., Wednesday, October 15. Please register ahead of time and watch for a new series of Webex sessions covering all aspects of intellectual property from cradle to grave.

Finally, an interesting note on unrelated information and don’t ask me how I know. The word is PREGRANT with an R not an N, so if you ask someone about their pregrant publication, don’t be surprised if they give you a book about prenatal care.

Ron Kaminecki has worked with Dialog for nearly 30 years in various positions, including Regional Manager and Senior Staff Advisor. Ron has a bachelor of science degree in Chemistry; a master of science degree in Computer Science and Information Systems, and a juris doctorate degree with a Certificate in Patent Law. He is a registered U.S. patent attorney and a member of the Illinois Bar, and a 31-year member of the American Chemical Society.

 DataStar Content Updates

PASCAL Reload Facilitates Cross-File Searching

PASCAL (PASC), the international database from the French National Research Council on Life and Physical Sciences, has been reloaded on DataStar^® with a number of enhancements.

• The document layout and search functionality in PASCAL is now similar to most other biomedical files on DataStar to enhance cross-file searching.
• Sources include the full and abbreviated journal names, ISSNs and publisher details.
• Author names include first names (where provided).
• New fields have been added, including original language title, conference information, corporate authors, and author keywords.

Additional information about PASCAL is available in the database Datasheet and database guide in BASE (search as BASE-PASC).

PsycINFO Reload Provides Updated 2008 Thesaurus

PsycINFO^® (PSYC), a key information resource for professionals and academics in all psychology and related disciplines, has been reloaded on DataStar. The file’s archive has been re-indexed with current descriptor terms from the 2008 thesaurus while retaining current database structure and functionality.

Check the Datasheet and database guide in BASE (search as BASE-PSYC) for information about the database's content and how to search it.

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