Report:Thomson Innovation/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Citation Coverage

Citation Coverage

For the purpose of this article, the term "citation" refers to a patent citation. To get more information on how we use the term citation, please see the citations article.

Innovation includes forward and backward patent citations, and also includes non-patent literature citations provided by the applicant or examiner.

According to the Thomson Innovation help file, the system receives citation data from "the primary/'first level' patent authorities and from INPADOC (the DocDB Cited References Master File previously known as the REFI)."^[1] The "first level" patent authorities include:^[1]

• DE from October 2, 1969
• EP from December 20, 1978
• GB from December 21, 1978
• JP from January 5, 2005
• KR from January 2, 2008
• US from January 5, 1971
• WO from October 19, 1978

INPADOC (DocDB Cited References Master File/REFI) cites received include:^[1]

• AP from July 3, 1985
• AU from March 18, 1971
• BE from December 15, 1987
• BG from October 29, 2004
• CH from June 30, 1963
• CY from November 12, 2004
• CZ from November 16, 2005
• DE from September 28, 1861
• DK from February 6, 1956
• EA from March 31, 1997
• EP from December 20, 1978
• ES from May 1, 1992
• FI from December 31, 1990
• FR from August 29, 1969
• GB from December 24, 1925
• GR from December 16, 1988
• IT from September 3, 1986
• JP from November 9, 1965
• KR from September 16, 2010
• LU from December 16, 1998
• NL from February 15, 1947
• NO from February 25, 2009
• SG from March 20, 2001
• TR from January 7, 1987
• US from April 28, 1936
• WO from October 19, 1978

The Thomson help file gives the following warning:^[1]

These earliest dates are the actual earliest dates and most to all of them should be expected to have gaps for which no citations are present. Caution should be exercised when reviewing these tables, however. Finland (FI), for example, has an earliest citation date of 1990-12-31 but we have only eight citations.

Notes on citation coverage

• Extending the citation information that was previously available through MicroPatent, the Thomson Innovation help file indicates that Korean citation data is present in Thomson Innovation from 2008. This is notable because, according to the EPO's Global Patent Data Coverage Report, citations only appear to be available for Korea after 2010.^[2]
  

• The INPADOC worldwide bibliographic file should not include much citation data beyond what is listed above.
  

• The Derwent World Patents Index file does not include citation data; there is a companion file produced by Thomson Reuters that contains patent citations, but it is not loaded on to Innovation. When the DWPI file is searched, citation data is displayed as part of the record view from other data sources.
  

• Finally, Innovation will have one advantage that was first introduced to Delphion: non-patent literature citations may be linked to their corresponding records in the literature or business collections offered with the product (separate subscription required). This means that it will be possible to go right from viewing a patent of interest, to reviewing the journal articles cited in it by the examiner or applicant as useful prior art.

Editor's Note:

Much of the citation data in Innovation comes from the industry-standard file INPADOC/DOCDB, which is used as the bibliographic backbone of most patent search engines. Although far from complete, this file is probably used to compile citation data for all of Innovation’s competitors. The only known competing file is the Derwent Patent Citation Index, which appears to have less coverage than the INPADOC/DOCDB file. (The DPCI only covers 10 authorities (EP, WO, US, GB, DE, JP, BE, FR, NL, ES) and does not contain GB, DE or JP data before 1994, making it less comprehensive than INPADOC (which includes citation coverage for 26 authorities, as shown in the list above).^[3])