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November 2009

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From the Editor
We are always eager to share information with you about new Dialog initiatives, and the November issue has quite a few — Dialog Twitter, Essential Tools Web pages, Innography and more. You'll learn more about resources on Dialog regarding healthcare — a hot topic these days — as well as enhancements to Dialog databases, and of course, the free file for the month, Foodline: SCIENCE, just to get you started.

Dialog is all a-Twitter
If you tweet and even if you don't just yet, you might be interested to know that Dialog now has a Twitter site — DialogLLC — to help keep you up to date with the latest news at Dialog with minimal impact on your time!  We view this as another step in a long tradition of building feedback channels with our customers. Dialog plans to tweet news and opportunities of all types, for example, on the site now are links to free trials, Intellectual Property Webinars, and an invitation to attend Dialog Forums in North America this Fall with a focus on our strategy and vision for the future. Begin following DialogLLC today, or if you are not a Twitter user, sign up now.

Eye on Innovation communicates value
We hope you enjoyed receiving the first issue of Eye on Innovation in October, which highlights innovation in research-driven environments. The first issue identified innovators in the field of solar energy. This brief, informative e-Newsletter is designed to help you communicate the value of research tools like Dialog to your organization.  We hope you pass it along to others and encourage them to sign up to receive it directly.

Dialog representative elected to SLA Board of Directors
Liz Blankson-Hemans, director of market development with oversight for strategic planning and implementation of marketing activities outside North America, has been elected to the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Board of Directors. She will serve a three-year term starting January 2010 in the role of SLA Chapter Cabinet Chair. Liz is an information industry specialist with a long track-record of engagement and activity with SLA, serving at various levels, both local and international. 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.

Discover essential tools for Dialog and DataStar research
Locating critical resources for successful research on Dialog and DataStar in your area of expertise is easier than ever! Use our new Essential Tools pages for Intellectual Property, Pharmaceutical & Biomedical, Business Intelligence & Market and Engineering & Technology research, and access the most useful resources for a subject area all in one place.

Tabs on each page give you quick and easy access

• Find out What's New on Dialog in your area of expertise
• Get a Fast Start into your research with the popular How Do I...? series and other quick reference tools
• Delve deeply into content with database-specific Search Aids and User Guides
• Develop your content and search expertise with a wide variety of Learning Resources for interfaces such as DialogClassic Web, DialogWeb, DataStarWeb and DialogLink 5
• Hone your search skills at no charge with our Free Practice resources.

Using the new Web pages
To use the new Web pages, just click the link to your subject area. For example, if you're primarily interested in patents and trademarks, use the Essential Tools for Intellectual Property Research to jump-start your research. Here are some examples of what you'll find:

• Quick Links — Link to the most-requested Dialog and DataStar search aids, such as Successful Searching with Dialog Command Language or the DataStar Quick Guide.
• Fast Start — Identify the vital resources available for patent and trademark research such as the popular How Do I...? series, Dialog Bluesheets, quick reference cards and document delivery options.
• Search Aids — Locate all of the additional tools available for searching in individual patent and trademark files, such as the International Classification codes indexed in the TRADEMARKSCAN^® files, the Derwent WPI Dialog Online User Guide, or the INPADOC/Family & Legal Status (File 345) Kind Codes list.
• Learning Resources — Develop your search and content expertise by taking advantage of Dialog's free learning resources, including live Webinars in English, French and German, detailed seminar workbooks, and e-Learning resources.
• Free Practice — Refine your search skills with resources for free practice with tools like the featured Free File of the Month or with Online Training and Practice files such as ONTAP^® Derwent World Patents Index (File 280), ONTAP^® INPADOC (File 253) or ONTAP^® TRADEMARKSCAN — U.S. Federal (File 296).

Pair Innography with Dialog to uncover trends and more
The pairing of Dialog's precision search and Innography's advanced IP business intelligence analytics enables you to uncover and see patterns and trends in patent literature at a glance. With new features from Innography you can:

• Effortlessly export citations, IPC classifications, patent strength and many other details from a multi-select check list
• Quickly search INPADOC legal status and perform opposition searches with new query syntax
• Efficiently download PDF documents and view first page diagrams

Innography integrates information from patent, financial and case law databases to allow fast analysis and visualization of results, giving you a view that is both intuitive and visually appealing. Its strengths are in analysis, visualization and collaboration; so you can even blend and graph very large sets of data quickly with other information to produce a result that is larger than the sum of its parts.

Types of searches
Currently, you can conduct four types of searches: patent keywords, company name, litigation keywords and patent number. Innography searches U.S. patents, EPO patents and published applications, PCT published applications, INPADOC bibliographic data and Japanese published applications. You can search using Boolean operators, proximity and fields.

All of Dialog's 20-plus databases are searched at one time, using either the search interface on Innography or Dialog, and results are assembled into any of several breakdowns—by patent document title/number or integrated with other data.

Types of analysis

• Patent keywords. Output has many options and includes a "heat map" of the company with the most patents in an area, along with a color-coded estimate of total sales dollars for the company as reported by Dun & Bradstreet. This same information can be visualized as a "bubble map," showing the relationships between a company's patent portfolio strength and its abilities to execute (that is, how likely it is to capitalize on its intellectual property). You can create a world map of the locations that generated the patents or a breakdown by pie chart, including inventor (great for finding experts), date (looking for trends) or others.

• Company name. The output gives the financial background for a company based on Dun and Bradstreet data and also lists the company's main competitors based upon the classification codes of each company's patent portfolio. To help understand the company, patent litigation information is also provided as are various normalized spellings of the company's names as found in the patent files.

• Patent number. Searching by patent number yields a summary sheet with front page information, including a title, drawing, claims and an abstract.

• Litigation keywords. Using litigation keywords provides the same analysis as above, but with a different source. One key feature is the ability to see the patent numbers involved in the litigation, which are usually difficult to find.

Additional tools from Innography
Innography also has filters for dates, revenues, source of information (e.g., country), class codes (both International and U.S.) and both patent similarity and patent strength. Both of these latter features are in the form of sliding bars that enable you to change parameters quickly — and the charts reflect that change immediately.

Patent similarity depends upon the number of class codes each patent has in common. Patent strength is based on research analyzing strong patents and assembling various common parameters. Number of citations, length in prosecution, number of claims, amount of litigation, and more were found to be key indicators of patent strength. Innography uses this data to put patents into bins so these non-subject sensitive filters can be used to narrow or broaden retrieval.

There are various search specific analytical tools available too.

• A patent number can be mined for its patent citations (both forward and backward) to find potential opportunities and trends. This can be carried further to search, "the patents that cited the patents that cited the patent," for both forward and backward citations to give another non-subject term view of the area.
• Semantic analysis of text is also possible and a claim or an abstract, or even a large amount of text — like a disclosure — can be analyzed.
• Infringement and invalidation are also available, and this data will locate potential patents that can be used to find infringers or to invalidate a patent, based upon subject area and priority dates.
• And, recall that both the similarity and strength filters can be used to find not only the closest art, but the strongest.
• A key feature of importance to searchers involves searching for patents for a concept and then mining the results by either international or U.S. patent classification codes, with the ability to drill down to each level of the code, yielding the number of hits at each level. Thus, a searcher can use Innography to find the right class codes in a difficult-to-classify area.

To see how Dialog and Innography can work for you, attend one of our regular Webinars.

Research on Dialog: Authoritative answers to healthcare questions
Over the past decade, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies have had to navigate a challenging and rapidly changing environment in which shareholders, physicians, patients, payers, government and regulators are creating significant pressures for change. Despite steady demand for its products, the healthcare industry's current business model is both economically unsustainable and operationally unsuited to the kind of quick action necessary to produce treatments demanded by global societies. Healthcare is in the news daily and is affecting populations worldwide. For those in the United States new proposed solutions and counter proposals flood the airwaves. So, just how big is this problem?

The United States spends close to 17 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare, and that figure is projected to jump to 37 percent of GDP by 2050 if the current trend continues. The Obama administration via the stimulus package is funneling $36 billion to drive adoption of electronic health records, $10 billion to fund more National Institute of Health (NIH) research, and $1 billion to pay for comparative-effectiveness studies. However, new initiatives will impact payers, providers, and pharmaceutical and life-sciences companies. By 2020 the pharmaceutical market is anticipated to more than double to US$1.3 trillion, with the E7 countries — Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Turkey — accounting for around one-fifth of global pharmaceutical sales. Further, incidence of chronic conditions in the developing world will increasingly resemble those of the developed world. Thus, the healthcare industry will increasingly need pharmaceutical, biomed and life-sciences information.

Healthcare is a broad topic. Whether your research is on prescription drug costs, industry trends, pharmaceutical companies, R&D, healthcare in Europe or developing countries, Dialog has a wealth of information on each aspect of healthcare. To give you a flavor of what Dialog can offer, this article identifies a sampling of databases and sources on Dialog and DataStar to answer your healthcare questions and meet your research needs.

Where to start
Explore events on the frontiers of science and analyze research issues, chemical discoveries and commercial developments.  Track the drug pipeline and gain market intelligence on your competition by reviewing the latest research, market-share information, legislation, drug registrations, licensing and clinical trials.  Dialog offers the sources you rely on, including BIOSIS Previews^®, EMBASE^®, IMS Health, Wolters Kluwer Health (Adis), MEDLINE^®, Informa UK (PJB), Prous Science and more.

BEGIN with Dialog or DataStar content categories.With more than 700 databases in Dialog and DataStar, Dialog has clustered databases with similar topics into categories to make searching the databases easier. DIALINDEX^® supercategories, such as Biosciences (ALLBIOSCI) or Medicine and Pharmaceuticals (ALLMEDPH), let you browse indexes containing the most information on the subject you are researching. To focus a search, OneSearch^® / CROS groupings let you search smaller, targeted collections of files using the category name (e.g., health business (HEALTHBU), biosciences (BIOSCI), medicine or pharmaceutical and healthcare industry (PHARMIND)).

Healthcare business and industry news
Whether you're looking for an article related to creating electronic medical records, trends in the healthcare industry, a profile of a pharmaceutical company in France and its drugs coming off patents, or a survey of U.S. consumers in Florida who postponed obtaining healthcare because of rising costs or drugs in a company's pipeline, you can get the information from Dialog's suite of business and news healthcare, pharmaceutical and general industry databases. You can search authoritative sources, such as IMS Company Profiles (File 449), IMS Company Search (File 443), and ESPICOM Pharmaceutical and Medical Company Profiles (File 510) for pharmaceutical company information. For example, in File 510 you can track product introductions, follow new technologies, obtain annual sales figures by region, monitor product introductions, watch R&D and development cycles, and monitor approvals and clearances. To locate specific information on the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, use NewsRX Weekly Reports (File 135), Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industry News Database (PHIND) (File 129,130 / PHIN) and Adis Newsletters (File 428). For domestic and international regulatory, legislative, and business news and information in industries regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and The European Commission, FDAnews (File 182) will help you stay in compliance with international standards and FDA's complex and ever-changing regulations — to get your products to market faster and boost profits.

Other general business databases, like those below complement the specialty healthcare industry files with product information, current trends and challenges, market research and news:

• ABI/INFORM^® (File 15)
• Cengage Gale PROMT^® (File 16 / PTSP)
• Cengage Gale Trade & Industry Database™ (File 148 / INDY)
• TableBase^® (File 93 / BTBL)
• more than 11,000 news sources internationally in Dialog NewsRoom (File 990 / NEWS).

Full-text publications like Clinica, SCRIP, Life Sciences Weekly and BioWorld Today also offer complete articles at your fingertips. Investext (File 745) supplies broker reports in PDF format on the healthcare, medical supplies, biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

R&D information
Among numerous prestigious databases covering healthcare scientific research are EMBASE^® (File 73 / EMED), MEDLINE^® (File 154 / MEDL), EMCare^® (File 45 / EMCA), the fulltext of The Lancet (File 457 / LANC) and Global Health (File 162 / HUMN). Topics including health and healthcare economics, clinical medical psychiatry and mental health, human medicine—both clinical and experimental—are just a few subjects covered in these biomedical files. For example, if you're looking for research on a neurological topic such as ALS, you can find titles like "Research on neurodegenerative disease" or "A randomized selection trial comparing combinations of drug therapy for ALS."

More healthcare sources
In addition to covering the healthcare industry and specialized research, Dialog also offers databases covering medical devices and unique sources. For example, Incidence and Prevalence Database (File 465 / IAPV) includes more than 4,500 diagnoses and procedures. Inside Conferences (File 65 / BLIC) contains conference literature from medicine and pharmacology. Hospital Inpatient Profiles (File 462) and Outpatient Profiles (File 463) databases provide a comprehensive overview of hospital-based activity. To monitor developments in medical markets, identify new opportunities, assess product areas and draw up market plans in new countries, ESPICOM Business Intelligence Country Healthcare (MDST) and ESPICOM Country Health Care Reports (File 511) provide in-depth country profiles of healthcare, medical equipment and hospital services in approximately 77 countries.

Hindered by rising costs, slow adoption of new technologies, poor quality and system gridlock, the health industry as a whole must work together to meet the heightened expectations of patients, shareholders, and consumers. Whether you are an emerging company seeking venture capital to fund research or advice on a collaboration to commercialize a product, or an established company looking to improve or expand operations, you can count on Dialog to help you find the best information to achieve your financial, operational and strategic objectives. Information from Dialog can provide many of the answers to some of these 21st-century healthcare questions.

Note: Statistics from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Meet the global Customer Operations team
With this year's economic downturn, we have seen more customers looking for ways to streamline costs. Now more than ever it is important we understand our customers' challenges and provide alternative options to meet their business requirements. The Customer Operations (CO) team does so in a number of ways, for example flexible pricing and contract options and offering domain access to reduce the number of user IDs required.

Dialog customers depend heavily on the global Customer Operations team for everything from User IDs, passwords and account information to contracts, new sales orders and renewals.

Q: What is global customer operations and what do you see as the team's main mission?
A: Global Customer Operations works with customers and other groups at Dialog worldwide to provide access to Dialog and DataStar via User IDs and passwords, contracts, access to specific databases and much more. We support Dialog's corporate goals and ensure our team is a credible resource for all contract knowledge and processing. Our team embraces a number of commonly shared values — collaboration, accountability, customer focus, a bias toward action and results, appreciation and respect for diversity, entrepreneurial spirit and, at all times, the highest ethical standards. In our view, fostering a culture that embodies these values leads to success and growth for us and our business.

Q: Who is on the customer operations team?
A: The team is composed of five permanent members each with more than five years of experience at Dialog. Angela Goode, senior manager of Customer Operations and a 13-year veteran at Dialog, leads the group. To work in this unit, each member must have an understanding of financial concepts and be familiar with order processing and billing principles. Team members have bachelor's degrees and/or master's degrees with backgrounds ranging from accounting to finance. They also have previous experience with audits and compliance reviews. Because the group works so closely with customers and internal groups at Dialog, we are primarily client-focused.

Q: What tasks support your mission?
A: Our team works with internal groups across the Dialog business, particularly sales, the Knowledge Center, publisher management and billing. We create and manage Dialog and DataStar customer accounts, including new User IDs. No matter where you are located worldwide, Customer Operations makes sure your access to Dialog and DataStar is always available — that your User IDs and passwords are valid, your account is up to date and any contract you may have with Dialog is accurate and current. We review all new contracts for compliance and assist sales in account research, renewals and contract history. We also work with custom contracts and contract modifications. And, of course, we handle customer inquiries. We are always looking for ways to help our customers. For example, we have created an account support page on the Dialog Web site so it is easy for customers to update their account information adding users, changing a name or verifying a password.

Q: Why is your team's role so important to Dialog customers? And, what makes your job at Dialog so exciting?
A: Global Customer Operations adds value to Dialog from the time a customer becomes a Dialog user and obtains access to Dialog to selecting specific files a user wants to search to setting up specific contracts that meet their needs. By conducting our business in an ethical and professional manner, we are a team committed to providing a high level of service to all our customers! As an ever-evolving support function, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our services to our customers and other groups at Dialog. In fact, our goal is to exceed client expectations.

Together, we face similar challenges as we strive to meet our goals. We respect each other and take pride in the quality of work we do each day. At Dialog we are given the opportunity to identify and implement better work processes to make our jobs more efficient, and we have strong support from Dialog to achieve a sustainable work-life balance.

Watch for interviews with other groups at Dialog in the coming months.

Free File of the Month
Researchers at food companies need the best data available, especially when it comes to food safety, nutrition, sensory attributes, chemical make-up and flavor. The free file for November, Foodline^®: SCIENCE (File 53), is a unique source of information for the food and drink industry. File 53 is populated by a team of specialist editors who abstract 1,700 science and 700 market records every month taken from approximately 500 key industry journals, as well as books and patents. These editors summarize the key data and spell out commercial implications for the food and drinks industry. Containing more than 780,000 records from 1972 to date, Foodline: SCIENCE covers all aspects of the major food and drink product sectors, including basic research, processing, microbiology, nutrition and health, pest control and pesticides, sensory evaluation, composition and analysis, food safety, shelf-life, product development and innovation, waste treatment, retailing, biotechnology, environmental issues, hygiene, packaging, quality assurance and crisis management.

Use Foodline: SCIENCE to:

• Monitor advances in technology, innovations in nutrition, and novel applications of existing technologies
• Highlight the functionality of new ingredients
• Generate new product ideas
• Improve process performance
• Solve manufacturing problems
• Supplement patent searches by searching widely in the literature.

Review the Overview of Foodline: SCIENCE to learn more about this unique database for the food industry. Throughout November, you can explore this file up to $100 (either DialUnits or connect time) for free. Output and Alerts charges are not included. Take this opportunity to try File 53 for free throughout November.

 SciTech Content Updates

Spotlight on EMCare: A database for healthcare professionals
Have you tried searching EMCare^® (File 45) for your healthcare and nursing research needs? If not, you're missing a comprehensive literature database published by Elsevier, covering all nursing specialties, allied health professions, and many other areas related to clinical care. With its cover-to-cover indexing of more than 2,700 international sources, including peer-reviewed journals, trade publications and electronic-only titles, EMCare offers topics of importance to the healthcare field from complementary medicine, dental care, emergency services and critical care to geriatrics, medical, clinical and laboratory technology, mental health, psychiatric care and many more. File 45 contains more than 600 unique titles not in MEDLINE^® or the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL^®). It also covers 60 percent or 1,200 titles in (CINAHL^®).

In addition to more than 55,000 preferred terms available, originally developed to index EMBASE^®, the EMTREE thesaurus has been extended with more than 1,500 terms relevant to patient care. Using EMTREE lets you find titles on global healthcare issues, such as "The users' view on the delivery of speech therapy in the Brazilian Unified Health System in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil)," "Tuberculosis risk assessment in Italian healthcare centres," or "Healthcare quality and disparities: Attacking problems at their root." If your research is focused specifically on healthcare or nursing, EMCare should be at the top of your list.

CABI full-text linking now available on CAB Abstracts
Effective October 9, CABI's full-text repository of nearly 60,000 records is now available in CAB Abstracts (File 50) on Dialog.  The number of new records is estimated to grow by 10,000 to 12,000 records per year. The fulltext is available in Format 19, and a new index (RT=FULLTEXT) lets you readily identify records with full-text content.

The full-text records include:

• more than 370 journals (50%), 400 conference papers (50%) and other grey literature
• 80% of the articles in English
• journals from more than 56 countries including developing countries
• more than 75% of journals not available online from any other source
• full-text content for hard-to-find material from agriculture, health and the life sciences.

 Intellectual Property Content Updates

Final phase of CLAIMS reload completed
The final phase of CLAIMS^®/U.S. Patents (Files 340, 341, 942) has been completed. Reload enhancements have been applied through September 1, 2009 for Granted Patents and through September 3, 2009 for Published Applications. This 2009 release includes:

• Complete Assignee Name changes
• Complete indexing changes (including all Collection terms and new Green Technology indexing)
• U.S. classification changes
• IPC revisions and C.A. Reference Numbers for 2001-2008 granted patent publications
• Probable Assignees (i.e, pre-issue assignments, with additional value included from IFI).  

DWPI country coverage update
The coverage of Taiwan and India will be improved in the coming weeks with the processing of a deeper backfile for TW Utility Models and Indian B patents. In October, the DWPI editorial team started to process a backfile of Taiwanese Utility Models that will extend coverage back to 2003, starting with records published in December 2007 to maintain continuity in the file.  Similarly, processing of a five-year backfile of Indian B patents starting with records published in November 2004 and working back to January 2000 has begun. You will start to see these older Taiwanese and Indian records appearing in alerts and search results in the coming DWPI Updates.

We are also pleased to announce a significant enhancement to the Chinese coverage in DWPI. From DWPI Update 200966, all the claims will be available in English at the DWPI member level for Chinese Utility Models published from June 2007 to date and for Chinese Applications (CN A) from January 2007 to date. The claims are human translations, adding additional value to the search indexes and to the deeper understanding of the claimed protection for Chinese records.

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

Call me a taxi...
I once was asked what I wanted for my title. Not a good thing to ask of someone like me, but I thought about it and came up with a list. First was Grand Fleagle, roughly meaning the big chicken wing, but that was rejected. Supreme Poobah was already taken, so I have settled on, "Cesspool of Patent Information," though my business cards have a more formal title.

My favorite patent titles are those that are barely useful and just sneak in with the examiner's eyes blinking all the way. I previously mentioned a patent title, "Novel Composition," but at least that is descriptive. And the single term titles like, "Seat," (EP 1393657 B1) or even, "Composition," (US 5,856,283), which doesn't even say, "Novel," all pale in comparison to the latest: published applications entitled, "Unknown." (US 20090019645, 2009079958, and more).

Oh, yes, and when Derwent WPI rewrites the patent titles, words like "Composition" become "Compn." Such abbreviations are common in other databases, too, like CA SEARCH^®: Chemical Abstracts^®. So, to ensure proper retrieval of improper titles, you must make sure to use both the words spelled out AND abbreviated. Abbreviations are available from several sources, including EXPANDing terms to find the abbreviations in the related terms.

The IFI CLAIMS folks break out both the published application titles and the issued patent titles so that searchers can see the transition. For example, the "Unknown" title above has the issued patent title, "Composition Containing a Styryl or Imine Type Dye and a Thiol Compound, Hair Coloring and Device," which is a bit more descriptive than the published application. And, remember this database also has enhanced titles with keywords added after a semicolon to isolate the original title from the specially-indexed text.

While titles are not the best thing to search, they usually are (outside of the problems highlighted above) a quick way to determine if the search works. This is especially true in our various patent files many of which have enhanced titles usually indexed by human beings and not just machines.

The fruits of your labor...
The following strategy works well by using titles to identify really great hits. The search is called "cherry picking," because you KEEP only the best four or five hits from a general search and then RANK the results by class code (CL). Then, you use the best codes to flesh out the search. Steps are below, but if you want to see an example, email , and I will send you an illustrated search using this technique. It is the one I use when people call for help!

BEGIN 654 SELECT terms... TYPE s1/ti/1-50
	(Now you look at the titles and only KEEP the best ones, hence cherry picking.)
KEEP s1/1-3,5,9
	(This will keep the results in set 0, which can be combined with other sets, TYPEd or RANKed.)
RANK CL S0
	(Sort the class codes (CL) stored in Set 0 (S0) and then look at the codes that are most prevalent for the hand-picked best hits.)

To look up the code meanings, pick the first few items in the RANK list by simply putting in the numbers, e.g., "1-3." Exit RANK and,

Then, use the appropriate class codes to refine the search. This works very well, by the way, because it uses the codes the examiners actually used, rather than what the classifications state. Because examiners have to apply class codes, their own judgment gives you the best answers. Cherry-picking is actually fairly simple, and it does produce good results. And, it is the predecessor to another technique I shall write about in the future that I call, "Claims Focus" for lack of a better title.