Once you have received the results for a particular search, you'll soon realize there are various options available to you from that page. These allow you to export your results, create alerts, refine and/or group your results, and various other options as well.
This is what the results screen looks like:
Since this guide is meant to be an introduction to Patsnap, we'll try to keep it as simple as possible. If you want to learn more about some of the options available in this screen, you can find links to relevant reading material at the end of this page. Now, let's go over each one of these features.
Views
You are able to select how to display your results, there are five different views available. Each of the views will display different parts of a patent, and each one has different fields to choose from (more on that later).
You can find them at the top of your list of results.
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Settings
Apart from the views, Patsnap also allows users to customize their search results display in different ways. This can be done using the "Settings" button located at the top right part of the results screen.
View preferences
The second tab of the settings menu is "View Preferences". There are multiple settings that can be adjusted here. Result Display, Tag if Family exists, Language, and Stemming.
Results Display (Grouping)
The first option is "Results Display", it will allow you to group your total results by application, or by family. The available grouping options are:
Ungrouped: This option will display all the records that match your query.
One document per application: A patent can go through multiple edits through the application process. This shows only one document, according to the settings.
One representative per simple family: Patent applications are often filed in more than one country, with these applications comprising a simple family. This option will display only one document, according to the settings.
One representative per INPADOC family: Similar to the Simple families, this option will group documents that cover a single invention, over multiple countries. INPADOC families, as defined by the European Patent Office, include minor variations and extensions on the original invention
One representative per Patsnap Family: Patent applications are often filed in more than one country, with these applications comprising a simple family. Patsnap families include minor variations and extensions on the original invention.
Criteria for Choosing a Representative
It is also possible to customize the criteria for choosing a representative of the resulting grouped results.
When selecting "One document per application", you can choose the representative to be the oldest or the latest publication, or by publication type.
When selecting any of the family groupings (Simple, INPADOC, or Extended), you can choose to give priority to the representative based on Authority, Publication Date, Application date, or Most relevant.
It is important to remember that the grouping feature will only consider the results that matched your query. As an example, If you give priority to family members from the US, but your search only matched representatives from other authorities, then another representative will be displayed instead, even if outside of your results, a document from the US exists as part of the same family.
Tag If Family Exists
This option will display a flag indicator if a patent within the search results contains other INPADOC family members that belong to the tag family. In the image below, the tag indicates that within the family of this document, there is a family member from the US.
It is possible to tag a result if it has a family member from CN, DE, EP, FR, GB, JP, KR, RU, US, or WO.
Language
By default, the results of a search are displayed in their original language. However, Patsnap provides the opportunity to set the English or Japanese as the default language for the Title field.
The translation will be a "machine translation" for every country, except China, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam, which are supported with a "human-assisted" translation.
Stemming
Stemming will automatically look for any variations of each and every word you entered in your search. It produces morphological variants of a root or base word. It will search for the original word and expand the search to consider singular, plural, and tense variations
For example, if you choose to turn stemming ON, and search for the word "spraying", it will also search for variations like "sprayable", "sprayed" or "sprays". This will allow you to search for a base word and not have to additionally include variants of that word in your query.
Stemming OFF will only search for exact matches of the keywords entered.
Stemming ON only supports English words. Stemming does not apply to Assignee, Inventor, and any other person-related fields.
Filtering Your Results
On the left-hand side of the screen, you will be able to refine your search in two separate ways. One way is by typing relevant keywords into the text box with "Refine keywords" written within it; the other way is using the refine filters underneath.
Refine Using Keywords You will be able to write additional keywords in combination with boolean operators. By using the operator AND, only the results that contain the additional keywords will remain. Using NOT will exclude every patent that contains the additional keywords. These filters apply to the full text of a document.. |
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If you click on the "Advanced Refinement" button on the right side of the text box, you will have access to the same template that is used in our "Field Search". This will allow you to refine or exclude your results using keywords that only apply to certain fields, or parts of a patent.
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Refine Using Filters
If you choose to refine using the filters below, you'll have many options that will reflect information relevant to your results. In this tool bar, you will be able to use the following filters:
Grouped Assignee
Assignee
Classification
Application Year
Std. Current Assignee Type
Authority
Patent Type
GBC Class
Publication Year
Simple Legal Status
Legal Status
Legal Events
Family Country Presence
Inventor
First Inventor
Agency
First Current Assignee
Current Assignee Count
Cites Count and Cited By Count
Count of Patsnap Family members
Patent Value
Main IPC
SEP Source
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Most common refinements
Although all the refinements may well be used at some point we are aware that some tend to be used more than the others.
One of the common refinements is by simple legal status. This is often used for FTO searches since if a patent is inactive it can not be used as a prevention tool which gives others freedom to operate using the technologies mentioned in the patent.
Another common refinement is by authority. Since a patent that is filed to a national patent office is only enforceable in that country, if you choose to operate in a specific country, only patents from that country can be legally enforceable in preventing you from doing that. So if you refine by authority, you can see where there are white space opportunities available to you in countries that you are interested in operating within.
One more common refinement is by application year. This will enable you to get an idea of the technology fields that were particularly popular in a specific period of time. It also will give you some idea of the application trends in a given area.
It is also common to refine by IPC/CPC. This will allow you to focus your search on a particular area of technology. This will also enable you to see what is already out there in terms of innovation for this area and allow you to predict what the future progress may be in this area.
Other Features
There are some other options present in the results page that we are not going to explore in depth as part of this guide, but it is worth mentioning them, as they may come in handy at a later point in your Patsnap journey.
Analyze Results
Clicking on the Analyze button above your search results will allow you to select one of three different options. Analyze, Landscape, or Insights. |
Analyze
By choosing Analyze, you'll be able to conduct a detailed analysis of your results based on a variety of factors.
All views can be amended and further refined by clicking on the chart on the Overview page, or selecting the relevant Analysis or Refine options from the menu on the left-hand side. |
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It is also possible to export the information by clicking on the "Export" icon at the bottom of each view. |
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Copy/Save Query
You can copy the query you just used to your clipboard by clicking on the "Copy Query" button. If you have refined your search using the menu on the left-hand side of the screen , the refinement will be included as part of your query.
You will also find the option to "Save Query", used to save your query and also give it a name.
You will be able to access all of your previously saved queries from the sidebar menu located at the left of the screen. There, you have the ability to combine your saved queries, and experiment with the results. |
Export
The "Export" button will let you export the search results.
You are able to choose how many patents will be exported, what format you want to export the results in, and what fields you want to include as part of the export.
Save to Workspace
Using the "Save to Workspace" button you can add the results to a Workspace.
From here you can select which patents need to be added, whether to set up an automatic update and decide which Workspace to add them to.
Highlighter
This tool will allow you to see keywords highlighted in different colors in the results screen, and some other parts of Patsnap as well. It can be toggled ON/OFF.
The Highlighter tool supports multiple keywords with the same color, separating them with semicolons.
Sorting
It is possible to sort your results by selecting one of the 13 options. You can choose to order by Most relevant, Latest Application, Oldest Application, Application Num (Z to A), Application Num (A to Z), Latest Publication, Oldest Publication, Publication Num (Z to A), Publication Num (A to Z), Oldest Priority, Cited By Count, INPADOC Family Count, and Patent Value. |
Selecting Patents
You can select one, or multiple patents from the results screen by hovering your mouse over the number on the left side of each entry, and then checking the box that appears. | ||
When you do that, you'll notice that a menu pops up from the lower right part of the screen. From this menu, you are able to Export, Save to a Workspace, Extract Chemical Structures, Extract sequences, or Search the family members of the selected patents. You can also undo your selection.
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Pages
Finally, at the bottom of the screen, you can choose how many results there are on each page (20, 50 or 100) or to navigate between the available pages.
Best Practices for Search with Patsnap
To close this part of the guide, I'd recommend you to watch this video. It covers topics relevant to the first two parts of this guide. It goes through a few useful tips on best practice for whenever you perform searches with Patsnap.
Content:
1. Grouping your results by families
2. Limiting your searches by Authority
3. Building for complex searches
4. Changing the visible fields in your results view
You can also check:
- Alerts 101 (Patsnap Help Center)
- How do I group companies together? (Patsnap Help Center)
- Patent Families 101 (Patsnap Help Center)
- Stemming and Wildcards 101 (Patsnap Help Center)
- Simple Legal Status / Legal Status / Legal Event Search Guide(Patsnap Help Center)
- How Does Patsnap Valuation Work? (Patsnap Help Center)
- What are Standard-Essential Patents (SEP)? (Patsnap Help Center)
- How do I combine multiple search queries? (Patsnap Help Center)
- What Information is Visible in the Analyze Overview? (Patsnap Help Center)
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