From the Editor
Dialog wishes you a healthy, happy and prosperous 2010. This year looks to be an exciting one for Dialog as preparation continues for the launch of the new Dialog platform and interface. Here are a few of our goals for our winter training sessions and materials:

• Offer basic "Essential Tools" classes in all major content areas supplemented by a variety of advanced topics
(cont'd. below)

From the Editor (cont'd)

• Feature experienced Dialog content and search experts from the Global Support organization as trainers with classes offered in English, French and German by request
• Introduce guest trainers from our information providers who will provide overviews of the free files and additional in-depth topics
• Provide resources for self-paced learning using workbooks, on-demand modules and free practice opportunities to develop patent, trademark, business, biomedical, pharmaceutical and engineering research expertise

And we will be making a concerted effort to ready our users for the new Dialog interface to be available later this year. Read your Training Updates and the Chronolog to keep up to date on the latest at Dialog in 2010.

Discover essential tools for Dialog and DataStar research

Having a developed curriculum in our major subject areas is an important addition to Dialog training. This means that you can improve your searching expertise by expanding your basic knowledge of Dialog commands and continue on to more advanced techniques. Moreover, with Dialog’s many databases, you need to expand your knowledge of the content in your field of subject expertise, as well as areas that complement your subject.

If you missed the notice in the November Chronolog and haven’t explored the new Essential Tools Web pages, now is the time. Locating critical resources for successful research on Dialog and DataStar is easier than ever!  Essential Tools pages for Intellectual Property, Pharmaceutical & Biomedical, Business Intelligence & Market and Engineering & Technology research let you access the most useful resources for a subject area all in one place. 

Focus on Curriculum: Intellectual Property Topics

Intellectual Property is an expanding part of any company’s business. For example, IBM lists more than 1,200 trademarks on its home page. Patents are a source of competitive and technical information, and if wisely and analytically used, they can help in making strategic business and R&D decisions to gain competitive advantages in the global economy.

Dialog has patent and trademark databases with coverage worldwide that can answer your research questions. Featured in this issue is the intellectual property information on Dialog. We’ll focus on IP topics: content, training, search techniques and documentation so you can develop your searching expertise.

Use the Essential Tools for Intellectual Property Research to jump-start your research. Here are some examples of what you'll find:

Training courses for the IP researcher
Whether you like to set aside time to take a Dialog course or fit one in when you have a few minutes, numerous free Web-based courses—both instructor-led and self-paced — are available for users at all levels of expertise.

Several instructor-led courses in January provide new offerings for patent, trademark and copyright subject matter and strategies for all levels of expertise. In addition, a self-paced course on the Web site will help you learn the basics of patent searching using either DialogWeb—Command Search or DialogClassic. Introduction to Trademarks, another self-paced course, reinforces the instructor-led course and contains exercises to test your knowledge of trademark searching.

Instructional aids reinforce your learning
Quick reference cards, quick guides, two-page content sheets and more reinforce what you’ve learned in classes and self-paced modules. These concise instructional aids let you keep the information right at your fingertips.

The How Do I...? series with step-by-step instructions and sample searches covers the most-requested searches in different subject areas with 45 patent, 20 trademark and 13 copyright applications. Examples are given for DialogClassic Web™ and DialogLink® 5.

Focus on Content will help you improve your knowledge of databases in your subject. Try some of the following:

• Five-minute overviews of databases such as European Patents Fulltext, the free file for January, and past free files CLAIMS®/U.S. Patents and Derwent World Patents Index®
• Quick reference cards on trademarks, copyrights and the Five Most Common Patent Searches to name some
• Quick comparison charts identifying databases such as INPADOC and DWPI

Practice makes perfect
Nothing reinforces training like hands-on practice — creating search strategies and displaying results in a variety of databases.

Free ONTAP® ( ONline Training And Practice) databases let you practice your searches and hone your skills without incurring online charges. Databases and sample exercises are available in ONTAP® Derwent World Patents Index® (File 280), ONTAP ® INPADOC (File 253) or ONTAP ® TRADEMARKSCAN — U.S. Federal (File 296). Additional resources for free practice include the featured Free File of the Month, European Patents Fulltext (File 348) in January.

Whether you need intellectual property, business, technical or biomedical/pharmaceutical information, regularly explore the Essential Tools Web pages for all your training needs. Dialog will continue to provide a variety of training and materials to facilitate the learning process for all users.

Dialog and Innography®: together they provide a powerful combination
Combine Dialog's precision search capabilities and Innography's advanced IP business intelligence analytics to help you uncover and see patterns and trends in patent literature at a glance. 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. For example, you can create a bubble map to compare the ability of a company to perform versus the depth of a company’s patent portfolio. Basically, all you need to do is create a set of patents, sort them by organization, then display the chart — all using pull-down menus.

Trademark data integrated
Innography’s new version release integrates trademark data into its uniquely correlated patent, litigation, financial and other key business information solutions. Better manage your trademarks, gain additional competitive intelligence, uncover market trends and provide better protection to your organization’s intellectual property using the trademark data.

Whether you want to find potential opportunities and trends, analyze patents to find infringers or to invalidate a patent, Dialog and Innography can work for you! Attend a Webinar and learn how.
United Kingdom (January 20)
North America (January 17)

Search Techniques

Each month we offer a new technique to expand your research expertise. Try these tips for patents and trademarks.

Dialog Patent Tip
Patents Citation Index (File 342) provides access to millions of patent and literature citations. With RANK and MAP on Dialog you can analyze the data and store searches you can EXECUTE in other patent databases to access the patent records.

For example, Apple Computer, Inc. cited IBM’s patent US 6278443, granted in 2001, for a user-interactive touch screen with an onscreen mouse allowing objects to be moved around the screen by finger taps and rolls. Who else besides Apple cited IBM’s invention?

At this point you can TYPE out the records, or use RANK to do further analysis and check for the presence of images or drawings. See the Dialog Bluesheet for more information on options, features and formats.

Dialog Trademark Tip
Have you ever started a search in TRADEMARKSCAN® and realized after EXPANDing on a company name or owner a few different ways, that the company name did not appear to be in the database. It could be that the trademark was filed under a different entity, perhaps a parent company, or perhaps the company’s legal name was not the popular acronym you thought it was. Try coming in the back door by searching on a known trademark and then TYPing out a record.

Case in point: A researcher wanted to find trademarks belonging to Geico, the insurance company. In TRADEMARKSCAN® — U.S. Federal (File 226), she EXPANDed OW=GEICO, but the list of owners indexed by that name did not look promising. She tried SELECTing TR=GEICO? just in case she could find trademarks with the word geico, and perhaps they belonged to the owner she wished to search. She got results and her next step was to RANK OW. The RANK command yielded the answer in plain sight, but the searcher was not aware that RANK item #1 held the answer: Government Employees Insurance Company.

Not sure of the company name, the researcher thought, “Aha, I’ll pull up a record of one of Geico’s slogans.” She EXPANDed ET=SO EASY A CAVEMAN CAN DO IT and SELECTED E2

Alternatively, she could have SELECTed TR=(CAVEMAN? AND EASY?) and found the one record with the slogan.

Now she entered TYPE S2/9/1 to view the record. The record confirmed that the owner indeed has the legal name of Government Employees Insurance Company. With this information, the researcher was on her way to find the trademarks of that owner.