2007-05-06 "Patent Searching" review

The book, which benefits from the patent search training experience of their editors, fulfills a significant market requirements, since independent courses on patent search are not so common and in any case not unexpensive. The book, of 200 pages about, is very well written and includes a lot of useful web references.
The book is structured in six chapters.
Chapter 1 (Patent Law and Patent Searching ) summarizes basic notions of patent laws and describes the patent examiner job.
Chapter 2 (Types of Patent Searching) characterizes the objectives and the activities to be conducted in main patent searches, as patentability, validity, infringment, clearance, status of the art and patent landscape searching.
Chapter 3 (The Mechanics of Searching) is the most extended of the book. It presents three topics: a) how to initially scope a search b) how to conduct a search, also by iterative refinemens, and c) what are the different characteristics in searching different technology areas, as chemical, business methods, ICT, mechanical enginering.
Chapter 4 (Patent Analysis) begins with a clear distinction bettween patent search, described in the previous chapter, and patent analysis: a summary table at page 111 in fact distinguishes them for different different points of view, as audience, purpose and so. In fact, to quote the book "patent analysis extends the patent search to a technology assessment that adresses a business or research need". Hence the autor suggests as a patent analyis euristics that "if your (analysis) search has a density of more than one good record in every four, you have missed something". To translate this into information retrieval terms, patent analysis is more focused on recall, patent search is more focused on precision.
Chapter 5 (Approaches to Reporting Search Results) presents a not to overlook topics: as an example a final report has to clearly indicate the search sources and assumptions.
Chapter 6 (Search Tools) summarizes typical and value added capabilities of patent search tools and presents a short overview of most common ones, of course with the features available today, whith the obvious caution to verify the continuos evolution of each of them. Most common Non Patent Literature (NLP) sources are also presented