Report:MARPAT on STN/Viewing Results/Family Search Features

Family Search Features

Because they are all related to chemistry, every MARPAT record is also indexed into the CAplus file, a worldwide bibliographic database of patents and literature related to chemistry. Because of this, MARPAT records really represent a sub-set of CAplus records that have been given special indexing (in other words, every MARPAT record is really a duplicate of the same patent family record in CAplus). CAplus patents are organized into families by special CAS indexing rules. These rules are not fully disclosed to the public, but it is known that they represent intellectually assigned patent families. CAS relies on patent priority data to build families, and treats the first-indexed publication as the family “basic.” Later publications can sometimes be added to the family as equivalents, or, if they have a complex relationship with the basic such as having multiple priorities or having resulted from a divisional or continuation-in-part, they may be placed into a new family and become the “basic” for that family, to receive additional indexing.

The patent numbers that make up the CAplus/MARPAT patent family are displayed as part of a MARPAT record in a number of pay-per-use display formats. The field that contains the family patent data is the “PI” field, for “Patent Information Table.” Formats that display the PI field include the FAM, BIB, FBIB, OBIB, SBIB, PATS, MAX, STD and ALL display formats.^[1]

The STN platform has some tools available for analyzing patent family data, including the FSORT command and the Patent Family Manager wizard. These tools are discussed in the Analyzing Results section.

Editor's Note:

Although MARPAT patent families contains international publications, the records are entirely in English. This highlights the utility of the CAS indexing: CAS English-language abstracts and indexing terms are created by technical experts for non-English language documents upon their first appearance in the patent world, which makes these documents much more accessible to the English-speaking search community.