Report:MicroPatent PatentWeb/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Full Text Coverage/Japan (JP)
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Japan
English-language Japanese abstracts for published applications are searchable from October 1, 1976 to date; front page drawings exist in the database from 1980.
Notable Features:
This collection consists of English-language abstracts and bibliographic data only. These records are actual manual translations into English provided by the Patent Abstracts of Japan (PAJ) service.
MicroPatent states that bibliographic information and English language abstracts are provided electronically by JAPIO on a monthly basis. Formerly, there was a six month lag between publication in Japan and delivery of records from JAPIO. However, the EPO now states that the lag is closer to 3-4 months.[1]
Regarding Bibliographic Coverage in the Japanese Collection:
Regarding further bibliographic coverage, testing showed that a significant number of results pre-date 1976 in the system, diminishing over time: for example, there are over 100,000 published in 1975, but only 32 documents from 1972, and 4 documents from 1971. Furthermore, these records are sparse: they only seem to contain document numbers and classification data (and they do list forward citation information if other documents in MicroPatent's collection cite them), however, they do not contain inventor or assignee data. Thus, this extended coverage is not particularly useful for many common types of searching.
Although this additional bibliographic coverage does not really go back farther than INPADOC, which reports coverage from 1973, it does not seem as if these documents came from the INPADOC file due to their lack of complete bibliographic information. Their origin is unclear. See Bibliographic Coverage section of this article for a discussion on how the bibliographic collections stack up to INPADOC.
Sources
- ↑ The EPO's subscription page to the PAJ product, http://www.epo.org/patents/patent-information/subscription/espace-national/japan.html, accessed July 26, 2007.
