Report:TotalPatent/Search Syntax/Searchable Datafields

Although they are missing from the advanced search form, TotalPatent offers many additional and unusual data fields from its command line interface, including very detail-oriented fields, such as “Attorney/Registered Agent,” “Applicant Country,” and specific classification data that is not very often queried, such as “US Field of Search.” It also includes several codes which are specific to major patenting authorities, such "Intention of grant date" (EP only) or "Inventor Residence" (US, EP, and WO only). Limiting these fields to major collections was probably necessary because that data was not available or able to be scanned for the smaller collections that are searchable via TotalPatent.

These unusual fields may be helpful to searchers conducting large-scale analysis projects, which sometime use unusual data fields such as “Inventor country” to provide useful insights into the technological field. However, most of the data that is searchable via the fields described above will not be generally useful for prior art searching; rather, fields such as the date of lapse or change of status might only be useful to find a particular patent about which only certain clues are known.

One minor quibble to the long list of searchable fields described above is that there are so many of them that the field qualifiers are necessarily large and cumbersome to avoid overlap. For example, a search on for US applicant nationality would be conducted by entering the command “Applicant-NAT(US).” These long-winded commands may make it difficult for users to memorize and quickly type them. Some abbreviations are available for more common fields, such as Ab=Abstract, CLM=Claim, In=inventor, and TI=title.^[2] These abbreviations for common field qualifiers may make query construction a quicker process.

Another consideration is that, although LexisNexis contains all these searchable data fields, it is impossible to include most of them in a data export. The following data fields are the only ones included in the “spreadsheet” style export function in TotalPatent: Publication Number; Publication Date; Title; Abstract; Assignee(s); Normalized Assignee(s); Inventor(s); Attorney/Registered Agent; US Examiner; Asst. Examiner; Application Number; Application/Filing Date; PCT Application Number; PCT Application Date; Designated States; Priority Number(s); Priority Date; IPC; ECLA; USPC/USCL; JP FI; JP F-Terms; ICO; Backward Patent Citations; Forward Patent Citations; US Related Applications; Legal Status; Claims. More about exporting data from TotalPatent can be found in the Export Functions section. Analysis projects on any of the data points described above cannot take place outside of TotalPatent.

It is also notable that TotalPatent data is searchable by certain legal status data. Some competitors in the field have loaded, for example, US maintenance status data (such as Thomson Innovation) and EP opposition data (Thomson Innovation). It appears that TotalPatent has joined them by including opposition information under the field "Legal Opponent", and it also now appears to include a field "Expiration" that gives information regarding the expiration of a patent for failure to pay maintenance fees.