Report:Esp@cenet/Viewing Results/Viewing Individual Records

Viewing Individual Records

Clicking on any title from the hit list will open the individual record in the viewing screen, which contains a number of tabs that provide access to various data. The bibliographic data is always shown first.

The full record view, with bibliographic data tab selected.

The principal purpose of this tab is to present bibliographic data about the main patent document, when possible. Not all data points are present in the database for every document; for example, the document shown in the figure above is missing Inventor and Applicant names. In this case, the reason is that the document was published in a language with non-Roman characters (Japanese). Due to the great difficulty in standardizing the transliteration of these names into Roman characters, this data are often garbled, and the European patent office has elected to omit this data. (Out of 60 million records in the database, only about 38.9 million documents contain the name of the applicants.^[1]) Because this document is part of a larger family, the inventor and applicant data can be found by viewing the equivalent document facsimile images, or by investigating the bibliographic records for the other members in the extended INPADOC family. (For more on viewing Family information, see Family Search Features.

Other data is available for this record beyond what is shown in the bibliographic data tab. The other tabs are called Description, Claims, Mosaics, Original Document, and INPADOC legal status, respectively. These features are discussed in other sections of the article.

When a search retrieves an XP document (a non-patent document that has been indexed by EPO examiners), the individual record can be opened in the same way that a patent record is displayed. Only bibliographic data is available for these documents. When available, a link to an external source is sometimes provided to allow users to order the document from an online distributor.

Editor's Note:

A planned 2008 update^[2] may introduce keyword term highlighting functionality to the system, which would benefit the user, especially in conjunction with the enabling of full text searching (also planned for 2008).