Patent number World Patents

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web Patent Databases. The Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) [72] offers free World Wide Web access, http // www.uspto.gov/main/patents.htm, to a bibliographic patent database that uses the most current patent classification system, this may not match the classification data that appears on the printed patent, and to a full-text patent database that uses the classification data that appear on the printed patent, this may not match the current classification data. The databases start with January 1, 1976, patents. The full text of a patent includes all bibliographical data (e.g., inventor s name, the patent s title, the assignee s name, etc.) and the abstract, full description of the invention, and the claims. All the words in the text of the patent are searchable. If the patent number is known, the patent, regardless of year, can be ordered from the PTO. Automated searching of 1971 to date patents is available at some of the Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries. Prior to 1971 searching can be done at the PTO facilities or at the Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries. Commercial patent search services are also available. 

Figure 18.1. Total number of fuel-cell patents and fuel-cell patents per million capita (1990-2002) (world patents (WO) and European patents (EP)), source own patent analysis more background information can be found in Wietschel (2005).

WPIM (World Patents Index Markush), produced by Derwent Publications, Ltd., contains the specific and generic structure records for compounds in the patents included in Derwent Sections B (Farmdoc), C (Agdoc), and E (Chemdoc) since 1987. Sources include patents from 29 industrialized countries as well as European and PCT patents and also items from Research Disclosure and International Technology Disclosures. The compound numbers of relevant references found in WPIM can be searched in Derwent s WPI database to retrieve the corresponding bibliographic information. 

The pipeline of innovation, expressed in filed patents, has also changed. The Derwent World Patent Index shows that the number of patents in the world nearly tripled to 710,000/year between 1980 and 2004, whereas in the chemical industry it only doubled to 213,000/year. Since 1992, the number of patents in the chemical industry has been steady. 

For the Third Edition, a number of new and updated sources were used, including the latest edition of The Merck Index.2 Extensive use has been made of the US, British, German, and world patent literature with regard to the process information. 

The literature on explosives in scientific and technical journals is overwhelming, and the numbers of patents issued annually throughout the world are legion. The references in the Bibliography have been limited mostly to publications which have appeared within the last fifteen years and particularly to those which served to illustrate certain points raised in the text or some important developments in the explosives field. 

The choice of date range is arbitrary. The number of journal articles for each year was obtained from a search of electronic version of English-based polymer and polymer-related journals using the keywords polyolefin and blends. Within polyolefin keyword, the subkeywords used in the search were polyethylene (PE, LLDPE, LDPE, HDPE, UHMWPE, PE, etc.), polypropylene (PP, iPP, sPP, aPP, etc.), polybutene-1, poly-4-methylpentene-l, ethylene-diene monomer, ethylene-propylene-diene terpolymer, ethylene propylene rubber, thermoplastic olefins, natural rubber (NR), polybutadiene, polyisobutylene (PIB), polyisoprene, and polyolefin elastomer. For the polyolefin blends patent search, polymer indexing codes and manual codes were used to search for the patents in Derwent World Patent Index based on the above keywords listed in the search strategy. 

The literature to be reviewed was taken from searches on a number of online databases, including Chemical Abstracts, Derwent World Patent Index, European Patents Online, and the full text U.S. Patent database." The author has endeavored to encompass all the literature at least to the end of 1998. 

Figure 1.3 Number of patents published about PLA (USPO = United States Patent Office, WlPO = World Intellectual Property Organization, EPO = European Patent Office, JPO = Japanese Patent Office,...

Delphion, www.delphion.com/ (accessed August 9,2010). Owned by Thomson Reuters, this subscription service provides full text searching, large file export, and many data analysis tools for intemational patents. It can search a number of available international patent collections and includes the Derwent World Patents Index, one of the oldest online patent services with access to 18.25 million inventions from 41 different intemational patent issuing authorities. ... 

The WPIM file corresponds to Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) online file, and therefore includes documents from all of the countries that Derwent normally covers. Indexing for WPIM began in 1987, and since 1987, Derwent has double indexed all chemical patents with both the fragmentation codes and WPIM indexing. Specific structures are indexed if they are not part of a Markush structure in the same patent document. Polymers are not indexed in detail in the WPIM database. Polypeptides of 10 or more amino acids are indexed in a separate non-Markush database and are not included in WPIM. All four online services that carry the DWPI also have the WPIM accession numbers. WPIM indexes patents from all countries in the Derwent database, but it is available to subscribers only. 

A speciality offered by the World Patents Index is the Company Code. Derwent provides all big patent assignees (circa 21,000 companies) with a four-number code, which remains the same even after a change of name. Derwent calls them Standard Companies. Even smaller companies are awarded a code, but they have to share it with others and is not suitable for searching. A list of codes, following the abbreviations as well as the corporate and institute names, is contained in the manual World Patents Index Patentee Codes. Patentees in pre-1970 documents are searchable exclusively by means of this code. 

The formats for the individual numbers can be found in the appendix to the manual World Patents Index on STN. Here we have chosen the STN format. 

To the best of our knowledge, a bibliographical review of US patents devoted to photoalignment has never been published despite a number of review articles (see e.g. [7-11] in Chapter 1). Such a review is very important because (i) 70-90% of patent data is never published in other sources and (ii) web analysis of the patent documents is complicated, since a person of ordinary skills has to make a selection from the enormous amount of a weakly structured information. This chapter is a bibliography of US patents (December 2007 included) on materials and processes for the photoalignment of liquid crystals, liquid crystal displays, optical liquid crystal devices and anisotropic optical elements, and other nondisplay applications. We restricted our attention to US patents only, since the majority of European, Asian, or other world patents are duplicated in the USA. 

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