Report:TotalPatent/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Full Text Coverage

Full and Partial Text Coverage

TotalPatent is unique in the search world as one of the only patent search tools offered by parent company Reed Elsevier,^[1] which owns Univentio, a company that converts patent data into electronic text. As a worldwide patent data provider, Univentio’s coverage exceeds the European Patent Office’s free online worldwide patent data collection, Espacenet, for some countries. Many other patent search providers, such as (Thomson Reuters-owned) Thomson Innovation and Dialog, as well as products from Questel-Orbit, offer at least some data which has been produced by Univentio (most commonly, these search engines offer at least the Univentio WIPO/PCT collection).

TotalPatent’s extensive data content is the major feature that differentiates it from other search tools on the market. While most search providers offer full text data collections for only the major six patenting authorities (United States, Europe, PCT, Germany, France, and Great Britain) and English abstracts from Japan, TotalPatent offers full text collections for at least 31 patenting authorities, with more in development.^[2] See the Summary page for a list of country collections which contain full text records. Or see the Comprehensive Coverage Table page of this article for tables including bibliographic, machine translated, full text, and PDF image coverage hosted by TotalPatent.

Machine Translated Data

Although full text data collections are always valuable, these collections are not accessible to many searchers if they are not published in English. TotalPatent overcomes this limitation by offering supplementary English machine translation collections, also produced by Univentio. At least some of these English-language machine translations are only available to patent searchers via TotalPatent, and have never been licensed out to other providers. See the Summary page for a list of country collections which contain machine translated records. Or see the Comprehensive Coverage Table page of this article for a table including bibliographic, machine translated, full text, and PDF image coverage hosted by TotalPatent.

Editor's Note:

LexisNexis is not the only data producer to offer English machine translation collections: for example, Thomson Innovation hosts Japanese and Korean-language full text English MT collections which were produced by Thomson Reuters itself.^[3] Users should be aware that the quality and coverage of English machine translations will vary between producers. It should be noted that the coverage years listed in the Summary and Coverage Table sections stretch back to the first documents available, and are not necessarily indicative of exhaustive coverage.

There are also a couple of concerns specific to the TotalPatent database that make machine translated content difficult to search. Although the TotalPatent coverage page lists machine translated coverage for many authorities, it is difficult to test for the presence of this data. This is because when searching machine translated text, the original language text is also searched. There is no way for a user to only search the machine translated text, without the original text. This unlimited search can lead to erroneous results when using truncation with search keywords, because terms in the non-English text will be returned as hits as well (for example, a search on the English keyword term ventilat* could return the Dutch hit term "Ventilati"). This creates the potential for a noisy and confusing set of results.