Report:TotalPatent/Search History Interface/Alerts

Alerts

There are two types of alerting services provided by the TotalPatent system. Users may choose to monitor search queries to see if they pick up new results over time, or they may choose to monitor one or more patent documents (and their related patent families) in a set to be notified whenever that patent document (or its patent family) experiences a change (e.g. a new family member, legal status, citing information, assignee or classification status). In addition to typical search queries performed via the Guided or Advanced search interfaces, queries on individual patent numbers performed via the “Get a Document” interface may also be set as alerts.

Setting an alert may be done from the Search History page (for both queries saved to the Recent Searches and Saved Searches page), or it may be done from the “Create Alert” option that appears on the Results page. Selecting this option from any one of those pages will open the Alert dialog window, shown in the figure below (for search queries).

The "Create Alert" dialog window, showing options for monitoring additions to a search query (as opposed to monitoring changes to patent documents).

The options displayed in this window are described as follows:

Step 1: Choose the type of monitoring service desired. Users may monitor a database query to see if it picks up new hits, or a set of patent families to determine whether they experience a change in status.

Step 2: Assign identifying information to the alert. This section asks for a name, project ID, and description for the alert.

Step 3: Schedule the alert. Alerts may be run daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Users can set the exact day and time that the alert should first take place, and they can designate a date of expiry for the alert as well.

Step 4: Designate the delivery options for the alert. The results of a TotalPatent alert must be delivered by e-mail to the user, and will be delivered in the form of an automatically generated report. This report will consist of various bibliographic details of any new patents found by the search query, very similar to a report created by the export function, discussed in the Import and Export Functions section. The style and format of the report can be designated by the user via these menu options.

The figure above shows the setup page for an alert that will be run on a search query; the other available option is to set a monitoring alert on a patent family or group of patent families related to a search. This type of alert will monitor known patent records and update the user on any changes, including: changes to the legal status; additions to the patent family; change in assignee or classification; or the publication of a forward citation. The menu options shown for the patent monitoring type of alert are shown in the figure below. The only thing that has changed is that now instead of showing the search query logic, the user is asked to designate which patent documents from the results set should be monitored (if only one document is included in the result set, the document range section will identify the "All" range as (1-1)).

The Alert dialog window, showing options for monitoring a group of 5 patent records.

Patent document monitoring options in the Alert dialog window.

Since May 2009, the alerting feature now allows users to see the alert name in the subject line of the notification e-mail, and/or to see a "request a pdf" link in the body of the notification e-mail. In addition, there is a now an option when creating an alert which allows users to request compressed PDFs zipped into a single document for delivery.^[1] Additionally, new alert options were added for results displays in January 2010.^[1] Finally, the following enhancements were added to the alerts feature in December 2010:^[1]

• Forward Alerts to other TotalPatent users
• Custom Selections are available for Alerts. Choose "Custom Selections" from the Document View drop-down menu, and the following options will appear after the user selects the "Settings" link:

Custom Selections Settings window from the Alerts menu.

• Alerts received by users now contain the following new information and features:^[1]
  • Bookmarks for navigating in PDFs
  • Description for annotations
  • Entire search displayed
  • Frequency
  • Next run date
  • Table of Authorities with most recent updates

Alerts Section under the "History and Alerts" Tab

Under the "History and Alerts" tab in the main menu, users can select the "Alerts" option to view all previously scheduled alerts. From this list of alerts, users can select individual alerts to delete, pause, resume, or forward. Users can also select the following options next to each alert in the list:^[2]

• Choose "Change Schedule" to change the frequency or the expiration date of the alert.
• Select "Show previously run" option beside an alert to view a list of previously run alerts. Select the "View Results" link for the alert you want to view.
• Click the "Run Now" option next to an alert to immediately re-run the search.
• Select the "Edit Search" link beside any alert, and the Edit Saved Searches/Alerts page appears, showing the search parameters you previously defined for the alert. Edit the criteria you want to change and select "Save."

Options under the "Alerts" section of the "History and Alerts" tab.

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3} "Enhancements to TotalPatent™." LexisNexis website, http://www.lexisnexis.com/total-patent-enhancements/. Accessed March 23, 2012.
2. ↑ "LexisNexis® TotalPatent™ User Guide." LexisNexis website, https://www.lexisnexis.com/totalpatent/retrieveHelpManual.do?lang=EN (restricted). Accessed June 28, 2012.