Report:QPAT/Search History Interface/Alerts

Alerts

Alerting in QPAT must be included in the subscription price before the option becomes available to users. Alerts are run weekly, and the results can be added to a work file or delivered via e-mail in various formats, or via RSS feed.

Alerts can be defined in QPAT only from the hit list page, once the desired query has been run through the database.

Users can Create an Alert from the search results page.

Once selected, the following form will prompt users to define the alert. As seen in the figure, users can designate a sub-account for the alert, for tracking and billing purposes. Also, the collections to be searched are designated from this page. The bottom of the form presents options for the alert delivery format. Multiple file formats and report templates are available for this feature.

The “Create an Alert” dialog box.^[1]

The November 2008 update improved the functionality of the alerting feature. Some highlights of these improvements include more options on how frequently to run alerts, increased ability to refine the search results, and more ways to view alert results. Much of this increased functionality is accessed via the Alerts portfolio, Questel's separate website for retrieving, searching, and managing alert results. Complete details on the updates to the alerting system are available on the Questel website.^[2] The update includes the following points:

Features of the Alerts portfolio include:^[2]

• Accessible to all Questel users for retrieving, searching and managing alert results
• All alerts and results are all available at www.questel.com/qip and stored for a year at no cost (starting in September 2008)

In QPAT 6.7, users can now choose to:^[2]

• run alerts weekly or monthly (or even choose a different update code)
• receive results when an abstract is available only
• refine or expand the strategy of existing alerts
• designate very easily the PatentExaminer workfile module to store, analyse, rate, annotate alert results, attach documents and share everything or selected workfiles with your colleagues
• not receive email notification when an alert run shows no result
• not receive emails at all and consult results through the portfolio only

All alert results contain, at no additional cost:^[2]

• a link to the patent copy in pdf (or to each family member's if a family is available)
• a link to the mosaic of all drawings in pdf
• a link to the available registers when available, including Canada (CA), China (CN), European Patent Office (EP), United Kingdom (GB), Korean (KR), United States (US), Patent Cooperation Treaty (WO/PCT)...
• a link to the dynamic citation graph (showing cited and citing references)

All alerts on patent legal status, family information or register modifications can be accessed from the same portfolio, in the designated section (PatLegal Monitor).

Finally, in QPAT version 6.8, full text alerts were added to Patent Examiner (see Saving Results for more information about Patent Examiner).

Editor's Note:

The QPAT interface is somewhat unusual in that users must create alerts from the hit list page, as opposed to the saved query page. QPAT alerts, once delivered, offered the same functionality that is currently available in the export feature: links are provided to document images, drawing mosaics, the system's citation graph feature, and legal status registers, all of which can be accessed without a QPAT username/password. This means that the alert results can easily be shared with search recipients, even if they do not have a QPAT subscription themselves.

One minor drawback is that there is no way to set the day or the week that results will be delivered, or the day it will begin. This is probably a result of QPAT’s weekly update schedule; the system was probably designed so that updates will be delivered whenever new content is added to the database.