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From the Editor

Where to begin? The new features on the latest release of ProQuest Dialog™ are so numerous, we hardly know where to begin. For starters, though, read the article in this issue for an introduction to the newest updates and enhancements. You'll also want to be sure to check out the article about the new ProQuest Dialog Support Center, including new ProSheets—database documentation for ProQuest Dialog! Each of these endeavors brings even greater value to our experienced researchers and enables you to search the new service quickly and easily.

Of course, you'll want to read your regular favorites—Ron Kaminecki's column providing techniques for searching patent databases and prior art, as well as Smart Searching and Search Techniques. And there's more—new ProQuest Dialog training courses covering techniques and content, along with new self-paced modules detailing the latest features.

Take a few moments to see all that Dialog has to offer.

 

 ProQuest Dialog Updates

ProQuest Dialog latest release offers a wealth of exciting new features

Available April 25, the newest release of ProQuest Dialog offers new features you've been looking for. The first thing you'll notice is a new home page design, displaying the available databases in each industry sector in an immediate and easy-to-navigate way. We're incredibly excited that the thesauri for MEDLINE® and Embase® are now enabled with Explode, giving you even greater precision and flexibility in your search. Then there's a new post-processing option enabling you to keep records of interest throughout your search session. And that's not all—you can preview transactional pricing, too! Much more is being designed for future releases, as part of our commitment to keep evolving and improving ProQuest Dialog so it remains an indispensible and valued work tool for you.

Release highlights:

• Search features including additional qualifiers and connectors in MEDLINE and Embase, as well as limited truncation
• Thesaurus search in MEDLINE and Embase using command line search or the easy menu-driven Thesaurus tool
• Additional document format views to get just the amount of information you need
• Post processing, including print, save search, email, cite and export records. In addition, you can now save records as long as you remain in ProQuest Dialog; the link remains at the top of every screen. You can even change databases and select additional records. (See It's easier on ProQuest Dialog below for more details.)
• Alerts and RSS Feed enhancements, including modifying and resending Alerts and links to full text through e-journal links with OneClick
• Professional My Research, including an administrator module to customize work groups and views
• Transactional pricing preview functions on databases and results pages.

It's impossible to describe all the new enhancements in one issue. Watch for details about even more ProQuest Dialog features in the next several issues of Chronolog.

 

Identifying DataStar Account Administrators

With the ongoing development around the latest ProQuest Dialog release, almost all the content used by DataStar customers is now available on ProQuest Dialog. This includes specialized search features such as Explode, which are used by our biomedical researchers.

We are have started to communicate with DataStar customers about the process for migrating to the new service asking them to confirm the DataStar administrator(s) for their organization. However, contacts and emails do change over time. If you are the DataStar administrator at your organization and have not received an email about migration planning or were not directly contacted by your account manager, please email us at and identify yourself as the administrator for your site. If you are not the administrator, please contact him or her to help ensure we have the correct contact details. Thank you!

 

It's easier on ProQuest Dialog

Put all your best hits in one basket
Did you ever run a search and find promising titles you want to hold onto, but you're not finished searching? You may have thought, "This is really good. I don't want to lose this title, but I'd like to try some other keywords and test some other strategies, and then gather all the good records together to print out or email at the end — when I've completed my search."

Your wish is our command. ProQuest Dialog keeps records of interest during your search session. Log onto ProQuest Dialog and run your search. Browse results, and select the titles of interest. You can even preview the record by hovering over the Preview button. Continue searching. When ready, click on the hyperlink at the top of the page next to My Research that says n selected items (where n is a number).

As long as you remain in ProQuest Dialog, the link remains at the top of every screen. You can even change databases and select additional records.

Store selected items in the display format you choose, always with the option to change the display. These formats include brief citations, citation/abstracts, full text or citation/abstracts with full indexing. Display formats vary from database to database. Selected items lets you view selected records, add to My Research, as well as email, print, cite, export and/or save as file. The selected items remain in place throughout your online session. When you end the session, you release the selected items. However, you may also choose to store records to My Research permanently or for as long as you like.

 

 May Highlights

New ProQuest Dialog Support Center LIVE!

The new ProQuest Dialog Support Center is now live. Get answers to frequently asked questions, or browse through its searchable library that covers topics such as how to select databases, view results and use Boolean and proximity operators, just to name a few. From the Support Center, you can also locate search aids, e-learning resources and example searches.

Designed to complement the help information accessible from within ProQuest Dialog, the Support Center was created and is maintained by the Global Customer Support team. Check it out!

 

ProSheets—what are they?

If you know anything about Dialog and DataStar, then you know about Bluesheets and DataSheets. They've been around almost as long as the products themselves! Now introducing... ProSheets! Following in the same tradition, ProSheets provide professional researchers with all the information they need to perform command-line searching on ProQuest Dialog. This includes descriptions of the databases, available search fields with examples of how to create precise searches, limit options and more. Currently, 17 databases have detailed ProSheets, and we will continue to add ProSheets until they are available for all databases.

Also find the ProSheets at the Support Center. Just click the ProSheet Look Up tab.

 

 Intellectual Property Content Updates

Derwent World Patents Index: Adding value through error correction

In 2010, approximately three million patents were loaded into DWPI^SM, with 1.4 million of these being new records (basics) in the file. This was a 7.1 percent increase from the previous year. Processing this volume of data is a huge task, particularly as the original patent data can contain errors in the bibliographic data, which could impact the accuracy in searching.

At Thomson Reuters, the DWPI production teams use both programmatic rules and human endeavor to identify and correct as many of these mistakes as possible to ensure the accuracy of key value-add elements such as the DWPI patent family and Patent Assignee codes, and also to improve searching through the addition of International Patent Classification Codes (IPCs).

Each week, data from various patent offices is loaded (receipted) into the DWPI production system and conversion/validation programs are run to standardize all of the bibliographic data fields into a standard DWPI format. Through this initial processing step, records with errors or missing data are identified and are routed to experts in the production team to be manually corrected. Typical errors include incorrect priority or application numbers, or wrong patent assignee names or missing data, such as the IPCs.

In addition to these error corrections, the assignee names are checked against the DWPI internal Patentee dictionary. When a match is found, the relevant DWPI Assignee Code is applied. The dictionary is updated for any names that don't match a name already in the dictionary, and a new DWPI Assignee code is created and applied.

The chart below shows the percentage split of corrections in January and February 2011, across a range of individual patenting authorities, focusing on the following bibliographic fields — IPC, Priority Data, Application Data and Patentee Names (includes dictionary updates as well as corrections to names).

In this two-month period, DWPI production teams corrected 1,342 records with incorrect or missing priority information and manually applied or corrected an IPC on 645 Japanese records. Corrections to the priority data improve the accuracy of the DWPI patent family, as this is a key data element in bringing together patents relating to the same invention.

Below is an example of an incorrect priority number on a U.S. Patent Application. Priority Cited EP209339 belongs to SAP AG; however, it is not relevant to this document. The correct priority is EP290990, and this was corrected in the DWPI record by the editorial team.

Correcting errors in the original patent content is a key aspect of the DWPI value add, providing searchers with the most comprehensive and accurate patent content in one file — Derwent World Patents Index.

 

A Proximal and a Distal Tip
by Ron Kaminecki, MS, CPL, JD, director, IP segment, U.S. patent attorney

Speaking of acronyms
I recall sitting in a large meeting, listening to a presenter who was suddenly interrupted by a frustrated new employee. Confused by all of the jargon being spouted, the employee raised her hand and asked, "You are using a lot of acronyms, and I am getting confused. Could you please say what you mean in full?" Many people nodded in agreement, as they were also lost, but the presenter put on a kind look and very thoughtfully said, "That's the type of question you should ask your DSD." Believing he had answered the question, he then droned on with his presentation, complete with even more jargon. Of course, he never told the new employee who or what a DSD is!

The problems with acronyms are (a) they can be extremely confusing unless you know what they mean; (b) they can be spelled out with different words; (c) even though there is an accepted definition, they can still mean different things to different people and (d) technical types really love to use them and assume you enjoy using them as much as anybody at their level!

Some acronyms, like RFID (for radio frequency identification system) are fairly definitive as they mean only one thing, but other terms like GPS (for global positioning system — or is that service?) can also mean other things like gallons per second, a frequently-used abbreviation when discussing rates of change. Thus, the confusion.

Should patent searches contain acronyms? Well, because patents are written by technical people who will use common jargon, then, yes, you should use acronyms when searching. And, also use the terms spelled out in case a technical person did not get the memo that the long jargon term now has an abbreviated form. But if you use an acronym, what do you use to find the patents published before the jargon term was commonly accepted?

I like to look at an acronym when it first makes its way into the literature. Why? Because I like to identify when a concept was so concrete, it rated its own unique identification; and this identification was typically so verbose that an acronym was established to speed up communicating about it. This usually indicates the invention is more than just an idea, as the details are now being thought out or even applied in a working model. Identifying when an acronym (within the caveats listed above) was found in the literature, both patent and non-patent, can help in establishing what it was called before it was popular enough to rate an acronym. And, this really helps in searching for prior art because an invention can, and most probably will, pre-date its acronym.

Enter the Dark Ages
For example, the concept of a latent device that bounces a reply to a signal transmitted from elsewhere predated the term RFID. But the earliest patent using this acronym in the full text is a European Patent (EP 301127) titled, "Transponder Arrangement," applied for 31 July 1987, and published 1 February 1989. So, a search using the acronym RFID will not find anything earlier than this 1987 date. Even using a class code may not reflect what is known about RFID (pun intended), because there may not yet be a specific code for this invention. The frustrating thing is finding what this invention was called before the acronym became popular. This is an essential question to be asked when conducting a prior art search. I guess you could call this the prior art dark ages — that period when the concept existed but there was not a simple way of identifying it.

There are several approaches to solving this problem. You could check the inventors of this early patent for the earlier publications that use the acronym to see if they spoke at a conference or wrote a paper or filed a patent earlier to see what they called the invention at that time. Ditto for searching the assignees. But many assignees have multiple patents in many areas and you could get lost here. You could also check the classification code but again, you will find similar patents and may have to weed through thousands of hits. Indeed, any of these techniques can produce answers, but only by downloading prodigious amounts of data. So, what to do?

Dr. Eugene Garfield to the Rescue
Enter citations. Dr. Eugene Garfield showed that journal citations can help identify earlier research, so maybe the same holds true for patent citations. Look at the backward citations found in the patents that have the earliest use of the acronym. These earlier citations may give you prior art on the invention before it had an acronym.

In the case of the European Patent on RFID above, its cited records list several documents that push back the date of the concept of a radio frequency identification system. None of these cited records call it specifically "RFID," but they do describe:

• "Remote Passive Identification System," (WO 1984000869, dated 1984);
• "Identification Systems," (GB 8408538, also dated 1984); or
• "Single Frequency RF Powered ECG Telemetry System," (from the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. BME-26, No. 2, February, 1979)!

Thus, a patent search for the acronym RFID will state the earliest use of this concept is 1987, but checking the patents' citations will push back the concept of RFID possibly to 1979! And, checking these earlier references of these references (the citations of the citations) could push the invention of this concept of RFID back even further.

Pre-Acronym Prior Art (PAPA)
So, in summary, look up the acronym in a patent database and type out the earliest records in which the term was first used. In Dialog, there are several ways of doing this, one being searching by PY<YYYY (as in publication year is less than four-digit year, e.g., PY<1990) and then typing out these early references including CT (for cited patents) or RF (for non-patent references). Verify that the acronym means the same thing you are thinking. Look at the cited patents found in these patents for clues to what the concept was called before it had the bright, shiny new acronym. Repeat with the citations of these citations if necessary. No need to ask your DSD.

 

 Learn about ProQuest

Answers for business researchers in science vertical markets

Companies who recognize their need to monitor the latest developments and innovations in the sciences tap into ProQuest's comprehensive natural and applied sciences research resource, along with the award-winning deep-indexing resource, ProQuest Illustrata™. Science collections include agricultural, aquatic, atmospheric, biological, earth, environmental, materials, aerospace, technology, computer and engineering modules.

ProQuest SciTech Collection — and each of the component modules — combines three core content elements to optimize discoverability of relevant research:

• Full text journals
• Deep Indexing of tables and figures for search precision featuring the award- winning Illustrata: Natural Sciences and Illustrata: Technology products.
• Traditional bibliographic abstracts providing the widest coverage of the topic in the ProQuest Science and Technology collections.

Sometimes it takes a lot of reading and thinking to get the picture of what an author is trying to say. Indeed, librarians often wish they could search the data found in tables, charts and illustrations. Many health-science areas such as pathology, radiology, optometry, dermatology and epidemiology are intrinsically visual, and thus images have a high importance in study, research and practice.

ProQuest has developed Deep Indexing to search the pictures. Deep Indexing makes this visual data more discoverable. Behind the scenes, metadata is created for the granular information that appears in figures and tables within journal articles. ProQuest has made this data searchable to the advantage of the science researcher and those who think visually.