Report:QPAT/Data Coverage/Summary

Summary

Full and Partial Text Collections The following coverage dates were obtained from the system's user guide materials and represent the reported start dates for each collection.^[1] Please note that gaps in coverage may exist in any collection due to a number of factors, such as missing documents, scanning errors, OCR errors, even failure of national and regional patent offices to report data. No data source can be considered 100% complete, and searchers should consult as many unique data sources as possible.

Major updates have been planned to QPAT's full text coverage in April of 2009. See the Coverage and Updates page on the Questel website for more information about the coming changes.

Machine Translated Coverage

At the end of 2007, Questel began adding machine translated English titles and abstracts for German (DE), French (FR), Japanese (JP), South Korean (KR) and Chinese (CN) documents (this data is from 2007 forward; a backfile has not been produced). In addition, at the same time the company began receiving Asian data from JP, KR and CN (and later Taiwan, TW) on a “fast track” (from an outside producer): bibliographic data for documents from these countries will appear in the FamPat and PlusPat files within 2-3 weeks of publication. Questel has also begun to produce full text English machine translations for WO/PCT records published in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.^[2][3]

QPAT notes that they have invested additional time and energy into supplementing their Korean (KR) collection. According to a QPAT representative, machine translations for the KR collection are replaced with hand translated English abstracts as soon as they are available from KIPRIS.^[4] In addition, a June 2009 press release announced that hand translations assignee data for both the JP and KR collections will be produced from May 2009 onward.^[5]

Other Coverage

Citations: Patent and non-patent cited references are available for the African Regional Industrial Property Organization or ARIPO (AP), Australia (AU), Belgium (BE), Switzerland (CH), Cyprus (CY), the Czech Republic (CZ), Germany (DE), Denmark (DK), the European Patent Office (EP), Spain (ES), Finland (FI), France (FR), Great Britain (GB), Greece (GR), Italy (IT), Japanese Applications (JP-A), Japanese Granted Patents (JP-B), Luxembourg (LU), the Netherlands (NL), PCT International Applications (WO), Singapore (SG), Turkey (TR) and United States (US) patent publications.^[6] Relevancy indicators added by the EPO are searchable in QPAT.

Legal Status: The service includes the EPO-produced INPADOC legal file, and comprehensive JP legal status data from the Patolis Corp. is available via a subscription add-on. The service also provides links alongside search results to national and regional patent registers for Australia (AU), Canada (CA), China (CN), the European Patent Office (EP), the United Kingdom (GB), the Republic of Korea (KR), the US (US), and WIPO for the Patent Cooperation Treaty documents (WO/PCT), so that users can check up-to-date legal status information via these external sources.

Family Data: The system uses INPADOC data with a more selective algorithm to build smaller, more exclusive FamPat and PlusPat families (see Bibliographic Coverage for more information). The system will also display extended INPADOC families upon command.

Document Images: Thumbnail representative images are loaded into the database for most collections; complete coverage information is not provided by the database. Links to image mosaics on esp@cenet appear when no thumbnail is available.

Full PDF images are available for individual or bulk download via the service, up to 10,000 copies per year are generally included in the subscription price. These are drawn from primarily from the esp@cenet collection, and supplemented by the American (US), Australian (AU), Canadian (CA) and German (DE) patent office collections. See the Patent Copies section for more information.

Bibliographic Coverage

QPAT’s Fampat and Pluspat family files are built from INPADOC/DOCDB bibliographic data, which incorporates English abstracts where possible (especially notable is the Patent Abstracts of Japan (PAJ)). To see a current spreadsheet of INPADOC coverage see Downloading INPADOC Coverage.

FamPat and PlusPat coverage as described by the QPAT user guide is presented on the Bibliographic Coverage page of this article.

Editor's Note:

Notably, although the EPO's INPADOC/DOCDB file is the major source for QPAT's FamPat and PlusPat files, the QPAT user materials show slightly different coverage than the most current EPO coverage data. For example, QPAT claims coverage of Trinidad and Tobago (TT), while the EPO does not. Upon investigation, it seems that only three records are present with a TT country code in QPAT, and these are present in the EPO's esp@cenet database also. So it seems fair to say that the QPAT bibliographic files do not offer substantial coverage beyond EPO data.

Also notably, when the EPO introduced Costa Rica (CR), Ecuador (EC), and Peru (PE) into its data feeds beginning in week 52/2008, QPAT had already loaded this new INPADOC content on the Monday of that introductory week, December 22, 2008. Empirical testing showed that this data was available on QPAT earlier than it was available from competitors Thomson Innovation, PatBase, and Delphion. However, QPAT did not list these countries as covered by the FamPat/PlusPat files for many weeks after this data's introduction.

Given these factors, it is generally safe for users to assume that despite somewhat out-of-date user coverage information, FamPat/PlusPat data corresponds to the most recent INPADOC/DOCDB coverage, and that very timely updates to these files occur from EPO data feeds.