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September 2009

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From the Editor

For more than 40 years, Dialog’s dedication to the global community of information and knowledge professionals has meant ensuring you receive the latest information about ongoing enhancements to our services.  Our success in that venture is dependent on having up–to-date contact information for you and your colleagues who use Dialog services. We encourage you to update your individual user contact information online. Update your user profile by Friday, September 25, 2009, and we’ll enter your name in a drawing for an Amazon Kindle™2 (US $300 value) to be held September 30, 2009.

In that same vein of keeping you better informed, we’re pleased to announce two new e-newsletters from Dialog. ProQuest Product Update (Corporate & Professional) will focus on ProQuest for corporate customers to provide details on ProQuest products and how Dialog and DataStar are complementary. Eye on Innovation illustrates ways Dialog content and special features provide competitive intelligence that you may not find elsewhere.

In this issue, we focus on Intellectual Property—new training classes on patents and trademarks, articles on patent files and patent searching tips, new patent search aids and even using energy and environmental files for prior art searching. Also in this issue, be sure to read “Let Dialog help you go green” to see all the ways Dialog content covers energy and the environment and “The four-point Dialog advantage” with tips on using these files. With government spending increasing to fuel economies worldwide, Dialog and DataStar content in the “green” arena is sure to play an even greater role in corporate research in the months and years ahead.

Let Dialog help you go green

As far back as the 1970s, U.S. companies have dabbled in “green.” However, with the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, areas such as energy and the environment, which received the biggest allocation (nearly US$100 billion) are heating up. For example, nearly US$80 billion will be invested in grants to private industry for renewable and clean energy, energy efficiency and green transportation projects, including advanced battery research, carbon-capture projects, hydropower, thermal energy, biofuels and fossil energy (zero-emission power plants). A recent Los Angeles Times article, Stimulus package gives boost to green energy, expounds on how players are gearing up for growth.

A number of companies have already embraced environmentally-friendly ways of doing business. A few examples illustrate how companies worldwide from retailers to cleaning products manufacturers to snack-food makers are incorporating “green technology” into their business models.

• Technology advances are leading U.S. corporations to increase the amount of alternative energy they use. Intel, for example, has invested $10 million in five companies that develop technologies to better manage electricity supplies to homes and data centers. Investments are made to develop technologies that can reduce electricity bills and greenhouse gas emissions.

• Retailers such as Walmart, Target, Starbucks, Best Buy and Lowe’s are building prototype green-building stores.
• Companies are finding less expensive ways to incorporate green energy. Potato chip and snack-food maker Kettle Foods has installed 18 wind turbines on the roof of its new manufacturing facility. The turbines are projected to generate approximately 28,000 kilowatt-hours of power each year — enough to produce 56,000 bags of potato chips.
• SC Johnson, a leading cleaning products manufacturer, recently completed a transportation-logistics project that eliminated 1,882 tons of greenhouse gases over a 12-month period, used 2,098 fewer trucks, reduced fuel usage by 168,000 gallons and saved approximately $1.6 million.
• The German green tech sector already employs one million people in industries such as renewable energy and photovoltaic.
• Built in Spain, Europe’s first commercial power station harnesses the energy of the sun.

How does Dialog fit into the green movement?
Dialog with databases in a myriad of subject areas, including energy and environmental research and business and industry news, provides information for research to companies regardless of their industry. Here’s just a sampling of the resources related to green technology on Dialog.

Green business and industry news
Whether you’re looking for an article related to alternative energy, a product description of a wind turbine or a profile of a company in Germany manufacturing photovoltaic batteries, Dialog’s suite of business and news databases provides the information. You can search authoritative sources, such as Dun and Bradstreet and other business databases, including Cengage Gale Promt^® (File 16) and Trade & Industry Database™ (File 148) and The McGraw-Hill Companies Publications Online (File 624) along with more than 11,000 news sources internationally in Dialog NewsRoom (File 990). In these files you can find profiles of public and private companies worldwide, products, industry trends, market research and news as well as the fulltext of publications like Energy Intelligence Briefing, Energy and Electricity Forecast, Platt’s Oilgram News, Platts Renewable Energy Report , and Renewable Energy Report, to name a few.

And, if you’re looking for information about doing business in under-developed countries, World News Connection (WNC)^® (File 985) offers extensive information from local media sources worldwide that focuses specifically on significant scientific, political, technical and environmental issues in these countries.

Energy and environmental information
Bring environmental issues, problems and solutions into focus with another group of Dialog sources. First, check Environmental Sciences (File 76) and Pollution Abstracts (File 41) — two environment-specific sources; then expand your search. Through the use of controlled vocabulary, indexed terms and descriptors, you can locate details on sources of pollution, pollutants, toxic effects, waste management, environmental technologies, biotechnology advances, policies and more in journals like Energy, Energy Conversion & Management or Energy Policy.

To examine pollutants, polluters, clean-up practices, detection and control technologies, recycling and waste disposal procedures, and pivotal issues linking industry and the environment, try Pollution Abstracts (File 41) or CAB Abstracts (File 50). Moreover, corporations are working to reduce emissions harmful to the environment and are developing pollution prevention strategies. For energy science and technology, Energy Science & Technology (File 103) is worth a search.

Specialized databases for green research
Because “going green” touches a multitude of industries, users need to look into specialized databases on Dialog. For example, businesses such as Walmart are constructing green buildings that encompass everything from the choice of building materials to where a building is located. Databases for this topic might include ICONDA—International Construction Database (File 118) or some of the CSA databases like CSA Technology Research Database (File 23) or Metadex^® (File 32). Automobile industry users could search MIRA—Motor Industry Research (File 81), RAPRA: Rubber and Plastics (File 323) or Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) (File 63). And, the good news is that whether you’re searching a specialized database or one of the core engineering databases like Inspec^® (File 2) or Ei Compendex^® (File 8), you use the same search syntax. Also, important for technical literature are conference proceedings found in Inside Conferences (File 65), BIOSIS Previews^® (File 5), Ei Compendex and other specialized databases. For more information, see Focus on Content Environmental and “Green” Information on Dialog for a brief overview.

Intellectual Property
With emphasis on the green movement, presumably patent applications and patent analysis activities will increase with a rush to develop new technologies. Not only will Dialog be able to contribute to research needs with patent files like CLAIMS/U.S. Patents (File 340), INPADOC/ Family and Legal Status (File 345) and Derwent World Patents Index^® (File 351) but also with energy, environmental and technology files for prior art searching.

Technology advances are leading corporations to increase the amount of alternative energy they use. Government incentives are making alternative energy, such as solar and wind power, economically feasible. Examples of green technology now include development of alternative fuels, new means of generating energy and energy efficiency, green building, environmentally preferred purchasing, green chemistry and green nanotechnology to name a few. It appears as if this field will bring innovation and changes in daily life of a similar magnitude to the "information technology" explosion over the last two decades. In these early stages, it is impossible to predict what "green technology" may eventually encompass; however, Dialog is just the service to use to keep you abreast of progress and future innovation.

New: Web page highlights database changes

A new Web page that displays changes to all output format when databases are reloaded or new files are added is now available to provide advance notice to Dialog and DataStar customers who may have internal post-processing systems impacted by changes to Dialog output format, as well as to third-party organizations. (Third-party consumers are producers of post-processing packages like ProCite, EndNote, RefWorks or companies who have a direct data feed from Dialog).

Each entry on the Database Changes page lists the reloaded or new database, all output format changes, a targeted release date and the date the file is actually released. Currently, the page lists all changes to reloaded files for the month of July 2009 with the most recently reloaded file listed first. The page will be updated as changes occur, and an archive of past month changes will also be available. In addition, a message will point the 1,300-plus customers who subscribe to Bluesheet and Datasheet feeds to a message via an RSS datafeed when additions are made to the Database Changes Web page. There is also a link to Database Changes from the Dialog Bluesheets page.

Free Files of the Month

For the month of September Dialog is pleased to offer several free files:

1. Food Science and Technology Abstracts^® (FSTA) (File 51), the largest, most comprehensive database focused on food science, has been carefully developed to provide a solution for all searchers requiring information on any aspect of food science, food technology, or human or pet nutrition.
2. CLAIMS^®/U.S Patents (File 340) contains more than 5.6 million U.S. patents
3. CLAIMS^®/Current Patent Legal Status (File 123) provides post-issuance legal status for U.S. patents.

Food Science and Technology Abstracts
FSTA encompasses both pure and applied science, making it ideal for both academic research and new product development by food or ingredient manufacturers. Other users include government departments related to food and agriculture and food industry consultancies.

FSTA is a powerful tool for researching medical aspects of food, food ingredients and nutrition and includes articles such as “ Iron deficiency and obesity: the contribution of inflammation and diminished iron absorption” (Nutrition Reviews). FSTA also covers all agricultural topics which directly relate to the food chain and so it complements databases such as CAB Abstracts (File 50) and Agricola (File 10). Equally for chemists, FSTA covers many chemistry journal articles that have aspects relevant to food products or ingredients.

In addition to journal articles, FSTA also provides information on thousands of food science patents, plus food-related standards and legislation, conference proceedings, reviews, reports, books and theses. The truly international coverage, encompassing a number of less-indexed titles, also sets it apart.

CLAIMS databases
CLAIMS ^®/U.S. PATENTS (File 340), produced by IFI Patent Intelligence, is the largest collection of U.S. patent references available in an online database. Published pre-grant applications (available from March 2001) and issued patents published for the same application number are combined in a single merged record containing both granted patent data and published pre-grant patent application data. In addition, IFI adds numerous enhancements to each record including:

Complete Assignee Name changes

• Complete indexing changes
• U.S. Classification Changes

Granted patent records from 2001 forward also include:

• IPC Revisions
• Chemical Abstracts Reference Numbers

Published Applications from 2001 forward also include:

• Probable Assignees

CLAIMS^®/Current Patent Legal Status (File 123) contains post-issuance legal status information for U.S. patents. Coverage includes: certificates of correction, reassignment, reexamination requests and certificates, extensions, expirations, reinstatements, reissue requests, adverse decisions on interference actions and disclaimer/dedication data.

Communicating Dialog value to our customers: An interview with our Marketing team

The direction of any company depends heavily on its marketing team. Our interview this month focuses on the Dialog Marketing team, led by Vice President Libby Trudell. We’d like to introduce you to the group that works to focus Dialog’s direction to customer needs.

Q: What do you see as the team’s main mission?

A: Our Dialog and DataStar services help professionals find authoritative answers through precise search and comprehensive content enriched by ProQuest. As the marketing team, our mission is to reinforce that value to our customers. We see this value as precision searching against authoritative content to access global patent, scientific, health and news databases. And, with Dialog’s deep content, to provide answers to drive scientific discovery, validate new ideas and commercialize products. To support this value, we provide global consultations, education and training.

Q: Who is on the marketing team?

A: The team is composed of five permanent members who are aided by several other part-time members. Libby Trudell leads the group and has more than 30 years experience in the information industry, 26 of which have been with Dialog. She has an MLS from Simmons.

• Liz Blankson-Hemans is director of market development, with oversight for strategic planning and implementation of marketing activities outside North America. She joined Dialog in December 2001 and is responsible for the development of the Quantum² program and the Dialog Customer Advisory Board in the regions outside North America. She has an MLS diploma from Ealing. Gabrielle Derriks reports into Liz, managing the Graduate Education Program (GEP) outside North America.
• Betty Jo Hibberd is director of market development for North America. She joined Dialog as a member of the Knowledge Center Product Support team in October 1998. Her later responsibilities included supervision of the Dialog Classroom Instruction Program and relationship development with information professional associations and Quantum² in North America. Betty Jo has an MSIS from Drexel University. Allison Evatt reports into Betty Jo, managing the Quantum2 program for North America.
• John Gallagher came to Dialog in 2000 as a contract analyst with a focus on customer service and sales support and in subsequent roles, he implemented pricing initiatives. John currently works closely with the sales and finance teams to improve price plans for customers to derive the maximum value from Dialog products and services.
• Melissa Barney Schaufler first joined Dialog in October 1998 and held several strategic marketing and support roles during her nearly 10-year tenure. She recently returned to Dialog from LexisNexis to take on the role of manager of marketing services and promotions. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University.

Q: What tasks support your mission?

A: We work with all internal groups across the Dialog business, particularly sales, as well as customers and professional groups to keep them up to date on what’s happening throughout Dialog and ProQuest. We manage brand identity, advertising, events and trade shows, pricing plans, policies and guidelines, the Quantum² Leadership Development Program, the Graduate Education Program, and the global Customer Advisory Board. We also create customer and industry communications to keep our customers informed of the newest developments at Dialog and also how Dialog and ProQuest complement each other.

Some of the special projects we work on are the database promotions, regional training Updates worldwide, liaison with professional organizations like SLA and AIIP, and much more. Maintaining the Dialog Web site and planning new product and content launches is also our responsibility. Every day is a new challenge and offers unique experiences.

Q: Why is your team’s role so important to Dialog customers? And, what makes your job at Dialog so exciting?

A: We reinforce the value of Dialog by the quality of Dialog customer service, training, account relationships and marketing support. To us, that is very important work. Our work is also extremely diverse. Because Dialog content is greatly varied and so are our customers, we could be working on a patent quick reference card or a workbook on scientific searching one day, and the next day presenting to information professionals at SLA on creating best practices for information services. We may be writing newsletters like the Chronolog each month or creating new communication tools we think our customers will find useful. Some days it’s hard to keep up with all the different types of tasks, but that’s what makes it so interesting and fun.

 SciTech Updates

Science content notes

Several databases in the SciTech area have been reloaded. You can find specific changes on the new Database Changes page and on individual Bluesheets for the files. Here are some notes on the reloaded files.

• The 14 th Edition of Merck Index Online (File 304) has been loaded with the addition of 988 “retired” monographs and 10,350 extensively revised “active” monographs in the file.

• PsycINFO (File 11 / PSYC) has completed its annual reload. Changes include a reloaded thesaurus with expanded list of terms, an enhanced display with new characters, including subscripts, superscripts and special international characters and new fields for publication history, status and copyright.

The four-point Dialog advantage

Should a company, a country or countries or regions cooperate on alternative energy plans? Answering this comprehensive question requires knowing the issues: What are the benefits and obstacles? For example, is it technically possible? Is it economically viable? What are the environmental issues? Is it practicable within the current legal, market and regulatory situation?

We’ve touched on some of the databases in “Let Dialog help you go green” that will provide valuable research to answer these questions. In this article we’ll look at some of the search advantages Dialog provides—indexing, coding and special search tools.

Focus your search with Dialog indexing
Dialog records are carefully indexed to provide preferred terms to enable you to find the topics you need even if you do not know all terms for your search. Records contain descriptors—keywords that describe the focus of the article—and identifiers—more recently added keywords to keep up with terms for hot topics. New terminology can be especially important when searching a topic like “green technology” or “biofuels.”

Let’s look at an example. In Ei Compendex^® (File 8), entering “biofuels” as our search term and displaying the records in the free Format 8, we see titles like “The development of biofuels in Asia” and “Biorefineries for biofuel upgrading: A critical review”—articles right on target. Looking further at the descriptors and identifiers in these records, we find more search terms such as “Energy security,” “Indonesia,” “Social and environmental impact,” “Thailand,” “Transport fuels,” “Bio oil,” “Bio-chemicals,” “Biomass conversion,” “Biorefineries” and many more. Using these terms, we can take our search into any specific aspect of biofuels or even information about biofuels in a particular country. In addition, many databases are equipped with coding systems to focus the search in a category of information; for instance, from this same search we have codes: 525.1 (Energy Resources), 524 (Solid Fuels) or 523 (Liquid Fuels). And, you’ve learned all this from one search in one database!

Search multiple databases
For easy searching, Dialog has placed its databases into categories of similar files. For example, a search on alternative energy will find results in the Environment and Energy DIALINDEX^®/OneSearch^® categories or for regulating energy, the category Energy Regulations and for a business focus Energy Industry News. With DIALINDEX and at a reduced cost, you can scan a group of databases with your search strategy to see which files have information. Although you may not retrieve 10,000+ articles with your search as you would in a Web search, you will get targeted records that will lead you to the narrower topic of interest, if necessary.

Tools described here only touch the surface of all that Dialog has to offer. Sign up for a free online class to learn more or take advantage of training workbooks and At a glance modules to increase your Dialog searching expertise.

Dialog doesn’t just provide world-class content, it also gives you the tools to build your expertise at the same time!

 Intellectual Property Updates

Latin American countries added to INPADOC

According to a Newsflash from the European Patent Office (EPO), “the nations of this geopolitical region have been putting a lot of effort into improving their intellectual property systems to attract worldwide interest in [Latin American] patent protection.” INPADOC/Family and Legal Status (File 345) country coverage already includes over 706,000 Brazilian, Argentine, Mexican and Uruguayan patents. Beginning in late 2008, the EPO began enhancing Latin American coverage by adding patent data from 10 additional Latin American countries — Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru. In the past nine months, over 15,000 patents have been added for these new countries, bringing Latin American coverage to almost three quarters of a million patents found in 600,000 INPADOC families. This means much of this coverage represents new inventions originating in Latin America. The EPO recently announced patents from Bolivia and Colombia will be added later this year.

The updated INPADOC (File 345) Bluesheet lists all countries whose patents are available in the database. INPADOC now covers 96 countries, including EPO and WIPO/PCT publications. In 2009, legal status was added for Chinese and Russian documents, bringing the total legal status coverage to 43 countries. In addition to INPADOC’s extensive country coverage and clustering of patents into INPADOC families, abstracts and cited patents are provided for many documents, making this the “go to” file for international patent coverage.

A Proximal and a Distal Tip
By Ron Kaminecki, MS, CPL, JD, director, IP segment, US patent attorney

It’s a cruel life
I used to search for a living, and one requester would always give me a hard time. “I hate you and I hate having to pay you and I don’t like being here,” he once told me. Before you judge him, let me tell you what I did every time he came by.

I am a slow study. That is, it takes me some time to absorb a concept and then work with it. As a searcher for a large company of researchers, I struggled with trying to identify a concept and flesh it out while the requester patiently starred at me. So, I used three stacks of paper, each of a different color. On the first sheet I recorded notes while the requester told me about the invention. Once done, I would then take a sheet from the second stack, and here I would use my scribblings to lay out the concepts into rows. I then pulled various thesauri and other reference materials off the shelf and put synonyms and concept codes in the appropriate column, spelled out the inevitable abbreviations and corrected the misspellings.

The third time is a charm
All the while, the requester would patiently watch me work. When I was done and had run it all past this person, instead of going online, I would take a sheet of paper from the third stack and rewrite everything, but this time I would look up the prefix codes for classes (usually CL= but sometimes IC= or even EC=) and then determine which proximity operator to use, which terms needed EXPANDing first and which ones could be put together, etc. I’d figure out the truncation and also a back door plan if cutting a term down too much yielded strange hits, possibly from different languages. I also would try to tag the most comprehensive term (the “Magic” term, if there was one) that should be put in first because maybe that one would find a key piece of prior art and we might not have to use all the other terms, however unlikely that was. If there was no such term, then maybe there was a group of terms that should be searched first because they were the most important concept. So, the first page was general notes, the second was used to flesh out the concepts and the third was how to enter the system commands.

By the time I went online, the requester was frantic! You can see why he hated me! But, by now the online search was the fourth time I visited these terms and along the way I could think about Plan B (for when Plan A didn’t work), plus it helped me to understand what the person really wanted. Not that I always found what the requester wanted, but this approach, while frustrating for some, gave me time to understand the concepts, most of which were new to me.

Patents are particularly difficult to search because the inventor is trying to prove she is the first person to have created the idea and, of course, there are not terms that adequately describe it, so why not make up something? Worse, think of the problem the patent offices have with indexing new technology! They have to apply classification codes to all of these inventions that are, by definition, novel and may not be adequately described by an English term. My methodology also forced me to use various sources and the class codes on which the patent offices spend a lot of time.

So, of course, one day I asked the requester why he loathed me so much. He said, “Well, one time, and one time only, you found something I would never have found, so I feel I must have you do a search...but I still hate you.” After that, we became friends, though I am sure he still swears out loud whenever he thinks of me and my slow way of learning but obviously redeeming way of searching.

Derwent World Patents Index^® enhancements

Did you know ... DWPI timeliness has improved; Taiwan coverage has increased; DWPI manual codes for 2009 are updated; and national patent office indexing is included for the Japanese, European and U.S. patent offices.

1.  Timeliness of updates
Through the first half of 2009 the DWPI editorial teams have improved the timeliness of the DWPI value add significantly across all technology areas. The average number of days from the time a patent has published until it appears in a DWPI update has dropped from approximately 60 days with Update 200851 (August 2008) to less than 15 days with Update 200949 (August 2009). Currently the overall average timeliness is 15 days.

Progress has also been made on improving the completeness of DWPI records. This is an important measurement as it allows you to see when all of the available patents in a publication period have been loaded into DWPI and as an internal measure it helps DWPI indexers better manage the content being processed.

2.  Taiwan coverage

• New coverage of Taiwanese Utility Models (TW U) in DWPI started with records published from January 2008. Most records include only an English language title, with associated DWPI manual coding, although approximately eight percent have an English abstract available.
• TW A records (coverage currently from 1994 to 2004 and from January 2008 ongoing) and with the processing of a gap in published applications between 2005 and 2007 provides more complete coverage. At this point in August 2009, the records for 2007 and May to December 2006 have now been processed. The editorial team is currently loading the January to April 2006 data and will then complete the 2005 records. 
• From DWPI Update 200907 the coverage of Taiwan in DWPI has included TW Unexamined Applications (TW A), TW granted patents (TW B), and TW Utility Models (TW U), resulting in complete coverage of the patent kinds from this important authority.

3.   Manual Codes revised
Manual code revision for 2009 went live in DWPI update 200901. As with previous revisions the coding has been updated to:

• reflect changes in technology
• take into account external and internal suggestions for improvements
• make enhancements to the code descriptions and scope notes to improve the consistency of code application by the editorial teams.

There were 789 changes to the Codes, broken down as follows:

Table 1: 2009 Manual Code Changes

Another important change this year has been to the manual code descriptions and scope notes. By providing more information for the internal teams applying the codes, the understanding and consistency of application is improved. If you are using the codes, the additional information helps you find the most relevant codes for your search query.

Note : Thomson Reuters is asking for customer input for the 2010 manual code revision of the Electrical Patents Index (EPI) and Chemical Patents Index (CPI) Manual Code and Fragmentation Code.  Read more.  

4. National patent office indexing

• Quarterly reclassification updates were completed for U.S. classes, Japanese F/FI terms, ECLA/ICO codes and IPCs in January, April and July 2009. The next update is planned for October 2009.
• Japanese File Index codes (FI codes) and File Forming Terms (F terms) from 1963 to date are now fully searchable in DWPI.