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Search for Tomorrow: The Patent Office’s Growing Reliance on Technology to Locate Prior Art

Explore the Patent Office's reliance on technology for prior art search, keywords vs. classification, data insights, and search guidelines. Discover the impact of keyword search on diverse prior art sources.

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Search for Tomorrow: The Patent Office’s Growing Reliance on Technology to Locate Prior Art

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  1. Search for Tomorrow:The Patent Office’s Growing Reliance on Technology to Locate Prior Art Andrew Chin chin @ unc . edu IPSC 2007

  2. Patent Office Automation • 1984: Full-text search from 1976 (two terminals) • 1991: Full-text search from 1971 • 1993-94: Desktop access • 1999: EAST, WEST interfaces • 2000: “Big transition” • 2001: Full-text search from 1920 (OCR) • 2005: USPTO completes move to Alexandria, leaving “shoes” behind

  3. MPEP § 904.02 • General Search Guidelines • Text search is powerful, but rarely sufficient by itself • “Some combination of text search with other criteria, in particular classification, would be a normal expectation in most technologies.”

  4. EAST/WEST Supported Queries • Terms: • Keywords, phrases • Classes, subclasses • Connectors: • Boolean operators • Proximity operators • Truncation (i.e., stemming) • Field restrictions

  5. Questions • Does keyword searching tend to diversify prior art? • Diversity of classes/subclasses? • Effect of subject matter variations? • Diversity of ages? • Pre-1976 (1971) citations? • Stratification in citability rate? • Time decay in citability rate?

  6. Data • Available: • U.S. patents from 1976 • Full text • Citations • Image File Wrappers from 8/2004 • Examiner’s Search Strategy & Results (ESSR) reports from 2006 (scanned) • Not available: • Citations derived from search results • Search engine query logs

  7. ESSR

  8. Synthetic Approach • Use Moby dictionary M (354,984 words) • Impute (Citing, Cited) to keyword search if there is a word wє M such that: • w appears in the claims and detailed descriptions of both Citing and Cited • w appears in the claims and detailed descriptions of no more than 50 total patents

  9. Growing Reliance on Keyword Search

  10. Technological Classes Amenable to Keyword Search

  11. Comments • Stephen Kunin: • Keyword searching is more useful in “the chemical area where the terms are better defined” • Nestor Ramirez, MPEP: • Examiners in mechanical arts tend to look at all the patents in the class; biotech and chemical examiners rely almost entirely on text search

  12. Questions • Does keyword searching tend to diversify prior art? • Diversity of classes/subclasses? • Effect of subject matter variations? • Diversity of ages? • Pre-1976 (1971) citations? • Time decay in citability rate? • Overall diversity? • Stratification in citability rate?

  13. Classification Diversity:By Subject Matter

  14. Keyword Search Preferencefor Post-1976 References

  15. Citability

  16. Alpha

  17. Beta

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