[MUSIC] This is the first in a series of videos on patent searching in databases. A topic that we consider quite important in this course. And why do we do so? If you've made an invention, we want to know if your invention is new. Patents are not the only thing to be searched in that regard. But it's certainly one of the more important ones. Relevant nearby technologies are important from a competitive point of view. You will come up with a technical solution to a technical problem. But there may be other technical solutions to the same problem up there. And then there's dominance and infringement. Your molecule, enzyme, or gene may be truly seen for the first time by the entire family of genes that your gene belongs to. May be claimed by somebody else, and then holders of that patent will then dominate you with your new invention. And then patents are also a general resource of information. And patents in each be quite precise in order to be valid. This means that the materials in section and patents are often very precisely written and very easy to follow. And patents may be a source of inspiration. And not in the least, this may be a good platform for searching for relevant industrial partners for your project or business idea. In this course, we will investigate and try to use four different databases. The Derwent Innovation Index is the topic of this video. And the associated reading is Chapter 5.1 in the textbook. The two next databases are free, and then Scifinder is like Derwent, a paid for database. We trust that your home university provides you with access to these. And certainly DTU and Copenhagen University enrolling students have access to them. The text book in question is this one, and it also has an associated companion website. And if you look up here in the URL it is at icpbookcompanion.org. And here you have a link to the databases ofcourse the commercial ones, the links will only work for students at DTU and CBS. But again consult your home university. Now a little diversion, you need to brush off Boolean algebra. And I hope that this is a repetition, but if not this is your chance to refresh your memory. So this blop is the domain of indentions that we got, lactic acid bacteria. This blop is named all indentions that we got, wine making. And you can see that there is an intersection between the two. Some lactic acid bacteria inventions are for use in wine making. If we then add beer brewing as well, you can see that beer brewing and wine making have their own intersection. Some inventions are related to both of these but not to lactic acid bacteria. But in this case, what we are concerned with is this domain, that is lactic acid bacterium inventions that are relative to fermented drink speed beer brewing or wine making ort both. So into ever people express this as this Boolean expression, TS means, topic search equals lactic acid bacteria and beer brewing or wine making. This search string will not earn you any awards in this course, this is not how it's supposed to be done. But it is to illustrate the principles here. So what I want you to pay attention to is the parenthesis. What if we removed the inner ones and wrote like this instead? Well in that case, we would deal with the entire wine making domain plus this little triangle of the intersection between beer brewing and lactic acid bacteria. And why is that? That is because of what is known as operator persistence and that ends quotes a invisible set of parenthesis around them automatically. And the advise is, if in doubt, put in extra sets of parenthesis to express precisely what you want to express. This being done and Boolean operators are universal. But the way they're implemented in different databases, unfortunately is not. So therefore, the companion website also provides a Boolean operator handout. And this handout also comprises the wildcards that can be used. And again, unfortunately the data bases do not agree. And so right now, I will restrict myself to Derwent. And they use these three different wildcards that you can use in searching, and how do you use them? Well 0 or 1 character, you can put a dollar sign in color to cover both the British English and the US English spelling of color. One character, you can put it into woman in order also to comprise women, the plural form. And 0 to many characters, this is a horrible example showing the use of two different wildcards in the same search string. This end sign is named in a variety of ways, the question mark can be either a u or a y. And this, the asterisk could be either glycostatic or glycosylases. And then they can be in plural and singular. And if you think about it then this way of expressing that end sign mean actually comprises eight different ways. So why are we concerned in getting all eight different variations of this end sign mean? And that is because there is a fundamental difference between patent and literature search. And by literature search I mean the search in web of science and that I suppose that you'd doing for scientific papers. And the goal of a literature search, you shouldn't science is to find the best source of information on a given topic. However, the goal of a patent search is finding all the relevant disclosures. Disclosures in patent angle of the description of certain subject matter. And why is that? That is because if something is novel to destroying for your invention, it does not need to be in a very nice hand. Also the poorly written ones will do. So you need to find all relevant information in order to map the patent landscape around your invention. So in order to do that, we will explore a way of doing this that we call hierarchical search profiles, that is only supported by Derwent and that is why Derwent plays an important role in this course. So the principal of hierarchical search profiles is that you experiment and expand different domains of your search independently. So that you can actually figure out what happens. So you would group synonyms, including the alternative spellings, and you will do that with all. And you will combine various technical fields from the synonym groups using and, or, same. Same, we will return to what is for a Boolean non standard operator. And then the sets, when you have explored them sufficiently, then you will combine them with and. Let's look at a slightly silly example in a moment. But first, here is the Derwent Innovation Index interface, and you will recognize Web of Science. So if you are well experienced in searching Web of Science, there's a lot of things that you have seen already. We will select between Web of Science and Derwent Innovations Index in this drop-down menu. And we will select Advanced Search in this. Nothing in this course, no matter which database, will be using the simple search. In order to build Boolean expressions, we need the Advanced Search interface. Note also here that Learn more about Advanced Search has a link here to a help system. Look here at the samples that are provided and there are more examples to look into to guide you in how to string together Boolean search strings. And then you have the Boolean operators, AND, NOT and our usual one, SAME that we will return to in a minute. And then we will in this course discuss TS for Topic, TI for Title, AU for Inventor and AN for Assignee and PN for Patent Number, and that is about it. The fields that are searched are these. The Title, the Abstract and the title, TS means abstract and title. Then you can search the entire description, but not so in Derwent, in USPTO and in Patentscope, that's why we are including these. You may wonder, how can we make sure that the abstract actually is representative of the patenting question? Well, the reason is that the abstract is not written by the inventors. But it is actually Derwent who takes the responsibility of lifting up relevant information and putting it into the abstract. Then we can search for inventors, and finally, we can search for assignee. What is an assignee? If I make an invention at Copenhagen University, I will immediately have to assign my rights to Copenhagen University. And most company employees will assign their invention to the company that has employed them. Their inventorship does not go away, that cannot be handed over to anybody, but you can have assignee. The unusual operator same serves the following purpose. Whenever you surf, you surf within a field. But if we use the word same between two terms then you search within one sentence. And that is particularly relevant to the abstract plus title that the two words in question are not separated from one another. And now to the somewhat unusual example of a hierarchical search profile. Imagine that you have made an invention to reduce the malodour from swine production. And then you want to search patent databases for this. You could then express the headline up here, the title up here as reduce odour in piggeries. Remove odor, American spelling, in pig farming. And prevent malodour in swine production. But as you can see, you can also prevent odor in piggeries or remove odour in swine production. So we have synonyms in columns and sentences in rows in these examples. So how would we try to express this? Well the firs thing that we want to do is to figure out what index we need to search. And if we scroll down a bit then what you see down here is that I have deselected electronics. I don't think that your invention in reducing malodour in piggeries is an electronic thing. It could be a ventilation system. But since we are by technologies this is probably in the chemical section. And you may ask where is biology. Where is the material that I want to add to the pig's feet, or the enzymes, or what not? Well biology is chemistry that's no biological understanding in the patent system. And that has several consequences that we will see later on in this course. But for the present, just remember that everything biology is chemistry. So we would probably deselect this one before we move on. And then we will do this, group the synonyms with alternative spellings with or, combine the technical fields, and combine the search sets. And it's usually done with and in the end. But a little later, I will show you an example where we don't do it with and in the end. And this sort of defines the final answer set that we will get from the database. So here are the search strings in Derwent. So the first one, we cast the first call to reduce or reduction, remove or removal, prevent or prevention. The next set, the thing that we want to remove is expanded in each set of alternative spellings and synonyms. And finally, the domain, the swine production. And you can see here there are quite a lot of parentheses and convoluted things going on in that Boolean expression. And then finally, we combine this one. And that's done with the # sign, 1 and 2 and 3. Now, you may notice here that no wildcards have been used. I would suggest that in the privacy of your own home. We'll try to rephrase this search profile using the wildcards. And also convince yourself that I have put and used the parentheses correctly, so that the third one that looks a bit convoluted makes sense. [MUSIC]
