What is the best way to keep track of changes within my technology field?

Whatever technology field you are interested/working in, it is highly likely that it will be consistently changing and you will need to find some way of keeping track of these changes. Patsnap enables you to achieve this using various different methods, those of which are included in this article.

How to become aware of what is within your technology field

From the "Field Search" page, type a number of keywords into the "Title/Abstract/Claims" field related to your technology field of interest and also include a few IPCs if you are aware of any for your technology field.

Once you reach the search results page, you can then refine your results using the filters on the left-hand side of the page. This can be based on specific inventors, assignees, IPCs or particular application/publication years. The equivalent of doing these in the search query would be to separate these different refinements with ANDs.

Once you have done this, it is worth creating an email alert based on this search query which will alert you to any new patents that match this search query. This can be done by going to the "Set Email Alerts" button, found at the top of the search results page. Make sure to select "Monitor technology" at this point.

When you receive this email alert, you will see information regarding these patents which includes their application/publication date and assignee.

How to track a specific competitor within your technology field

If you know of a specific competitor within your technology field, then you can track their activity within your technology field of interest by adding them in the Assignee field within the "Field Search" page for your original search query.

You can also create an email alert for this new search query using the same method as above.

If you know multiple competitors within this technology field, then you can repeat the exact same procedure for each of them.

Monitor citations of patents within your technology field

You can also create an email alert which will monitor if any of the patents within your technology field are cited by another patent.

To do this, firstly save all the patents that appear when you perform your original search query to a Workspace folder, which can be done by clicking on the "Save to Workspace" option from the search results page.

When you reach the folder, firstly make sure to set up an automatic update based on the original search query you used, which can be done by going to the "Automatic Update" option.

Once you have done this, you can then set up a "Citation Email Alert" by going to the "Email Alert" option and making sure to tick the box next to "Citation".