FTO searching can be fairly targeted when searching among US, GB, EP and WO. A search in CPC headings of interest can locate most of the references needed to provide an attorney. A supplementary search in the corresponding IPC headings can gather the remaining references of interest. Also, with citation searching a reasonable amount of ground can be covered. How about FTO searching in the jurisdiction of China? Here’s what I’ve discovered…
Searching IPC headings can reveal a treasure trove of undiscovered relevant references. IPC headings are notoriously large. Even when they are limited to an ‘alive’ status and the relevant jurisdictions, they can still be too large to search in full. What can be done to explore these headings successfully?
- Start with the most relevant keywords
- Include IPC headings higher up in the index hierarchy. This may inflate the results, so use targeted keywords first, then extend to broader ones. These headings are too important to miss.
- Search by assignee, if you notice recurring assignees.
- By all means, limit the relevant heading to the ‘alive’ status, CN and date and scan the images as a last check, so that nothing has been missed. This is easy to do with databases like Questel Orbit, where images can be scanned as a list.
- From relevant references, try to find other IPC headings and test the waters with simple keyword searches.
- Citation searches of CN references can yield a low number of results. It’s possible to include even more references in the citation search and then do further citations on the references of the original search.
- If there is more than one critical feature, search each feature independently.
Searching IPC headings can reveal a treasure trove of undiscovered relevant references
- When working with machine translations, make a note of corresponding terms of interest. I was recently looking for the terms ‘connection’ and ‘coupling’ and sometimes noticed a machine translated version ‘buckle’. I added that to the strategy and it picked up more references that only used ‘buckle’ and not ‘coupling’ or ‘connection’. It wasn’t a synonym I would have used to describe the connection, but that was the machine generated term that was frequently used.
- Revert to other databases for other machine translations. This can add another dimension to your understanding of the claim.
- Iterate your highlights of relevant terms located.
- Use native language terms for critical features.
- Refer to the description to see if it provides clarity on a machine translation of a claim.
- Try to include full-text searches as well as the critical term may be used in the full-text and described differently in the claim.
- Synonyms are important. Make sure to use broad terms.
- The good news is the majority of CN references do have translations of the full-text.
