10 most common pitfalls of patent research > 1. Limited search results
Patents are legal documents, often written using technical terms or language not commonly used. This can make it difficult to discern the true nature of the invention and also to find relevant publications with basic keyword searches.
When your patent searches results are incomplete, you could be missing key information to inform your business decisions.
When your patent searches do not include a significant proportion of relevant records, you could be missing:
Use patent data that includes rewritten titles and abstracts. This improves the effectiveness of your keyword searches, as these abstracts include standardized terms that are more likely to match your search.
The ClarivateTM team of more than 900 patent editors translates, indexes and rewrites an average of over 85,000 patents from 61 sources every week to maintain the Derwent World Patent IndexTM (DWPITM).
Each DWPI record includes a descriptive title and an abstract that clearly summarizes key aspects of the invention, such as its key features, what it is used for, and what benefit it provides.
Patent searches that incorporate the DWPI find what other patent search tools may miss. DWPI improved keyword search results by 79% compared to patent searches performed without DWPI using other patent search platforms.1
[1] How patent search applications were evaluated: We hired an outside firm to gather and review results from Derwent Innovation and three other well-known patent search applications. We provided the searches for each of the four technology domains. The outside firm translated the searches using each application’s specific syntax and gathered the results from each application. To ensure a blind test, the outside firm consolidated the results from each application into a list of patent numbers for each search and removed any data that could be used to identify the originating search application. The results from each search were then reviewed by our team of analysts with subject matter expertise in each specific technology domain. Our analysts scored each result as not relevant, low, medium, or high relevance. These scores were then mapped to the results returned by each application. This allowed us to determine a recall and precision score for each application with equal weight given to each search. These scores are shown as percentages in Figure 1: Percent of Relevant Results Found. Searches were performed in January 2021. Refer to report “Patent Search Results You Can Trust” for additional details.