Support : Publications : Chronolog Archives : Issue 4, 2005

CLAIMS^®/U.S. Patents Annual Reload Completed

Dialog has completed the annual reload of CLAIMS/U.S. Patents (File 340). The annual reload of this file generally includes any patent reclassifications, references to the number of citing patents, assignee standardization, back posting of chemical indexing changes, and other corrections made by the database producer, IFI CLAIMS.

This year, IFI CLAIMS is introducing a new field, Probable Assignee, which identifies the likely assignee for pre-grant publications (PGPs). Typically, U.S. patents do not identify the patent assignee until the patent is granted. With the advent of published applications, the lack of patent assignee information has caused searchers some concern. So, IFI has developed an algorithm for identifying the probable patent assignee by using information from the USPTO pre-grant assignment files and relevant contact information. The new Probable Assignee field can be searched using the PA= prefix. To restrict patent assignees to probable assignees only, the suffix /PS can be applied: (e.g., S PA=WAL MART?/PS).

Two other new fields in this reload include: the Independent Claim Number field, and the Notes field, which provides information about extensions and parent case text. For further information on the CLAIMS/U.S. Patents database, please refer to the Bluesheet for File 340.

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