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December 2008

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Holiday message from your friends at Dialog

Dialog and the ProQuest family would like to wish you a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year. This certainly has been a unique year at Dialog, beginning on July 1, when Dialog joined the ProQuest family of businesses. It was a new day for Dialog, and the start of activity and productivity that hasn’t slowed down since. We’d like to share with you a few of the highlights.

• Suzanne BeDell, General Manager, described future directions for Dialog at a series of Fall Updates.
• The Chronolog returned, keeping you up to date with content, product enhancements, training and documentation.

• China trademarks expanded the trademark collection on Dialog. Reloads in biomed and technical files enhanced multi-file searching.

• Dialog named Quantum² InfoStars and provided Roger K. Summit scholarships to information professionals in all regions of the world.
• New web-based training expanded learning opportunities with self-paced online courses and new training materials and documentation.
• The Knowledge Center experts continued to provide quality customer support worldwide and began to provide training sessions, as well.

Dialog is already looking ahead to a productive and exciting 2009. Stay tuned — your Chronolog will bring you all the details you’ll want to know about news and events at Dialog.

InfoStars and Roger K. Summit Scholarship announced at London Online

Dialog inducted a new class of InfoStars at Online Information 2008 in London during the first week in December. These honored information professionals take a leadership role in improving the flow of information within their organizations.

• Alison Attard, Scientific Information Specialist, Ipsen Ltd, United Kingdom
• Gemma Giró, Head of Information & Regulatory Affairs, Puig Research Centre, Spain
• Sophie Graham-Godet, Health & Life Sciences Management Consultant, Accenture Health & Life Sciences Practice, United Kingdom

To read about the attributes and contributions of these InfoStars, check the Quantum² site.

Roger K. Summit scholarship awarded

Our 2008 Roger K. Summit Scholarship winner is Ms. Esther (“Essie”) Koster of the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria in South Africa.  Ms. Koster is currently pursuing a Master’s research program and working as an assistant lecturer at Pretoria. She expects to complete her degree in April 2009.

 Sci-Tech Content Updates

Incidence and Prevalence Database (IPD): Many functions in one place

Have you wondered what database to select to compare breast cancer incidence in Japan, England, Italy and Denmark? Have you tried to obtain trends in bypass graft surgery for the last five years? What about a detailed article review of a rare disease such as acromegaly? Look no further—the Incidence and Prevalence Database (IPD) (File 465/ IAPV) is a comprehensive and efficient place to go for the world's epidemiology data.

Broad coverage
The database covers more than 4,500 diseases and procedures making it the most comprehensive resource for incidence and prevalence, morbidity, mortality and other health issues. It is also one of the deepest looks at co-morbidities and a great place to find information about rare diseases.

Methodology
Timely Data Resources Inc., producer of the information, gathers all data by hand, reads and writes the text for the database. Their analysts review hundreds of medical journals, trade journals, audits, online databases, registries, and market investment reports each month and summarize the data into “Article Reviews” with full source citations. The file also includes statistics compiled into Trend Data reports from the most recent surveys of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

As a result of IPD’s painstaking efforts in compiling information, its Article Reviews contain in-depth information:

• epidemiology data (incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality) and related topics (e.g., cost, risk factors, prognosis)
• non-disease topics like treatment compliance and managed care
• more general topics, such as chronic pain

Full source citations are provided for each review. Moreover, statistical information is included for every document and consists of tabular or trend data about the disease or procedure documented.

Whether you are a physician, a market analyst, or work in product development, strategic planning or new business development, the Incidence and Prevalence Database can help you with your medical and business needs—all in one database.

 Intellectual Property Content Updates

A Proximal and A Distal Tip

By: Ron Kaminecki

Terminology
Last month’s column was about terminology in patents, a topic that I find both interesting and amusing. I recall once receiving a summons to appear in a jury pool many years ago and laughing at the language, which included the phrase, “You must be and appear before…,” thinking that if you “appear before” then you also must “be,” though not necessarily the opposite. For decades, law schools have been teaching legal writing classes to do away with such arcane language, but such “legalese” still shows up in patents.

The patent as canvas
Searchers, however, can take advantage of this dialect of everyday English. For example, the salutation in front of a claim typically begins with, “A (specific device) comprising,” meaning that patents for the invention could be found by searching for the specific device only if it occurs directly in front of the word “comprising.” That is, SELECT KNIFE(W)COMPRISING/CM (i.e., select the word “knife” next to and in front of the word “comprising” in the claims field) would retrieve patents in which a knife was claimed—not a knife sharpener, nor a knife block, nor a knife throwing party game, nor any patent in which the word knife is not the primary focus of the patent claim. While not perfect, as this command would miss “knife blade,” which may be integral to the query, and it does not cover “consisting of,” among others, it still allows the searcher to focus a search and perhaps pick off a useful class code or assignee or such. It is a method of using legalese to identify the noun of the phrase and not the adjective. [Don’t ask who the assignee may be for that knife throwing invention above....]

Legalese works its way into titles because a vague title helps to hide a patent. The patent offices frown on obvious minimalisms like “Novel Composition” (the actual title of US 3,000,978), but many patent titles are just not very descriptive (“Mixing Apparatus for Mixing Materials,” US 5,385,403; and “Discharge Apparatus for Discharging Materials,” US 6,024,305, both to the same assignee).

This is why Derwent World Patents Index’s (WPI) (File 351) rewritten titles are so popular and why the enhanced titles found in the IFI CLAIMS files add so much. However, Derwent did combine its rewritten title with the original patent titles in the last reload, so the formerly all-English titles are now merged with other languages, meaning that a searcher can sometimes retrieve false drops when other languages are searched. This is especially true when the search includes a truncated term in which the endings of the words in one language connote something totally different in another language.

To see the Derwent titles in English, just add the suffix code /TD (as in Titles — Derwent) to search only the rewritten titles. And, the Derwent abstracts, again, all in English, can be searched by adding the /DA (as in Derwent — Abstracts) suffix or /TA (as in Titles and Abstracts) for both the Derwent-enhanced title and abstract. For example, SELECT GIFT/TA would retrieve the English word for what one gives to another at Christmas and not the German word which is spelled the same way but means something toxic!

Just the Claims
Claims can be searched by themselves, as long as you realize you are searching legalese. In some instances only the claims need to be searched, such as a freedom-to-operate request in which the goal is to find patents that cover a specific invention in which the requester wants to practice, but wants to see if anyone else has already claimed that area in a patent. In this type of search, one typically locates patents in an area and then narrows the retrieval to just those patents in which the specific invention is claimed. For example, SELECT (NANO? AND CIGARETT?)/CM will find patents claiming ways to…ah…cut back on nicotine, I guess.

Finally, my favorite patent claim comes from US 3,156,123, which is elegant in the brevity of both of its words in which the inventor claims: “Element 95,” of the periodic table, also known as Americium, and going to Glenn Seaborg. It is only fitting that Element 106 is called Seaborgium in honor of his work.

Please feel free to contact me directly with questions.

 DataStar Content Update

Pharmaprojects is redesigned

A redesigned version of Pharmaprojects (PHAR) on DataStar has just been released. Standardization across pipeline databases—IMS R&D Focus (IPUR), Pharmaprojects (PHAR), and Adis R&D Insight (ADRD)—will improve cross-file searching. Although there are no changes to the content, the reload makes significant changes to the layout of documents in terms of paragraph names and labels, as well as the sequence in which the paragraphs are presented. There are also some changes to the layout of data within paragraphs (e.g., data in ST (Status) is no longer presented in tabular form).

Some paragraph changes include: the addition of MF (molecular formula); OS (origin of substance), ME (mechanism of action), and HI (development history).

To review all changes and see a sample record, check the DataStar Datasheet. These changes are also displayed in the Notes section of the Pharmaprojects database guide in BASE. Search as BASE-PHAR.

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