Report:PatBase/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Updates

Updates

PatBase is updated several times a week, and an update summary is always available from the “last update” link under the "Information" tab on the side menu available beside the main search form. As of November 2011, this update page presents the earliest and latest bibliographic publication dates and full-text publication dates for China (CN), Germany (DE), European Patent Office (EP), France (FR), United Kingdom (GB), Japan (JP), Korea (KR), United States (US), and Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT/WO). The table also includes (?) icons that display any notes on full-text availability and machine translated full-text availability. This "latest updated" coverage table only lists the coverage for "Major countries," as of the last INPADOC update, and the user must access the full PatBase coverage charts to view the latest complete bibliographic and full-text coverage available.^[1] The table also does not provide alerts/reasons for any delay in data updates, such as the schedule provided by MicroPatent.

The PatBase Update schedule.

According to PatBase materials, United States (US), European Patent Office (EP), United Kingdom (GB) and Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT/WO) documents can be ordered as PDFs on the day of publication (they will be loaded into the database as searchable text on the next business day).^[2]

Editor's Note:

PatBase asserts that its update schedule for US, EP and WO data is fast in comparison to other providers. From the marketing PowerPoint presentation available on the PatBase website (not accessible on the main page):^[3]

“Coverage: US, EP, and WO data are updated on the day of publication, which is extremely competitive in the current global patent information market. No other provider yet claims to update several major authorities as fast as PatBase. This means it is the ideal service for international Alerts.”

However, the editors recommend taking this claim with some skepticism. Although no formal tests have been performed at this time, since US, EP and WO are highly important collections in the patent information industry, it is very likely that other services are also currently updating these collections on the date of publication.

It is probably more telling that PatBase does not include update schedules for the more minor collections: these updates may be more irregular. However, the editors do believe that for most collections, including the recently added non-Latin text collections, PatBase does maintain timeliness that is probably at least on par with general industry standards (if not better).