Easy Enough for an End User,
Powerful Enough for a Patent
Professional-
Priced to Meet the Needs of Both.
To cite this article please refer to the printed edition of TrAC: Trends Anal. Chem., 16 (1997) (in preparation)
USDA, ARS, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA
Patents are to companies as scientific publications are to universities researchers. They are the lifeblood of the operation. As patents have been more important and critical to the financial success of a company and not the technical success of an individual, they are often neglected or given minimal time in chemical information courses. In addition, searching patents tends to be more expensive than searching for other types of chemical information, as patents are searched for by patents departments. These patent departments tend to be staffed by lawyers and the financial concerns about getting and/or infringing (violating) as patent have allowed providers of this information to make this a high cost item.
While there are a number of excellent sources of patent information available on the popular online information services such as DIALOG, STN, and Questel-Orbit (QPAT), only Questel-Orbit has made some of this information available at no cost. Even better than this, are the web sites of all US patent data since 1976 made available by the US Patent Office. The International Business Corporation (IBM) has recently made available all US patents from 1971 on its web site. This article will describe only the QPAT and IBM Internet sites.
The QPAT-US database is a fully searchable, primarily fee-based, Internet-based database of over 1.8 million full-text U.S. patents. It has a graphical user interface and the ability to support both boolean and natural language queries. By offering a very rich set of search tools (boolean operators, left, right and internal truncation, set manipulation, query expansion advisors and several types of proximity operators), QPAT-US offers users powerful search capabilities. QPAT-US is able to serve many different market needs because of the content it offers - the full text of U.S. patents. The patents contained in QPAT-US are an unmatched source for technical information and are distinct from every other type of scientific literature. Unlike a journal article discussing matters of scientific principles, a patent provides an explicit "recipe" for a given technology. It is not enough for a patent to merely list the ingredients of a technical application or the scientific principles involved. To be granted, a patent must disclose sufficient information such that anyone "skilled in the art" would be able to replicate that invention exactly. The legal requirement imposed on patents for explicitness and detail results in a literature that is remarkably rich and useful.
For the industrial researcher, QPAT-US offers invaluable competitive intelligence and market knowledge. Often, examining a competitor's patents will provide in-depth and comprehensive information about strategies, production costs and product limitations. In a more general sense, examining patent information for a given industry will highlight important trends and directions within the industry. A further, and invaluable, use of patent information is to evaluate the patenting viability of a particular research effort. Taking advantage of the dynamic hypertext capabilities supported by the WWW, QPAT-US performs on-the-fly hyper text markup language (HTML) markup of search results and provides hypertext links within patent documents allowing the user to jump from one occurrence of a found term to the other.
A QPAT-US search result presents a HTML document that guides the user directly to the most relevant parts of the document as defined by the user. QPAT-US is the only patent database in the world that provides this powerful, innovative and invaluable feature. Also, in contrast to traditional online distribution practices, Questel-Orbit continues to provide a useful subset of the QPAT-US database for no charge. QPAT-US allows free, unlimited search and retrieval of all of the 1.8 million plus patent abstracts and bibliographic information it contains. To get more than the abstracts one needs to be a subscriber to the QPAT service. QPAT is available for unlimited search and retrieval for a flat fee of $195 per month.
While the above description of QPAT-US covers some of the properties and capabilities of the database and search software, examples are always the best way to show something. In this particular case, with the ability of the WWW version of this paper to have hyperlinks built in, it seems best to show directly how one can use the system. In the example which follows, one sees how easy it is to get free access to the QPAT-US abstracts database, perform a simple search, and see the results. The search in this example (and the search of the IBM patent database) is for patents about mass spectrometry. Owing to the need to register and logon to the QPAT system, some of the search hyperlinks will not work, but the links are shown here to properly represent what the system looks like to the user. The free QPAT searches shown here in this manuscript are only from the free sub-set of the full QPAT database.
Easy Enough for an End User,
Powerful Enough for a Patent Professional-Priced to Meet the Needs of Both.
After registering online, one logs on and gets directly to the search query
web page:
Of the 20530 hits, only the first 50 are shown below.
Of the above patents I have chosen one (which has also been found in the IBM patent database search below) to print out the details of the patent record. In this case it is for US Patent #5616918.
S1: 11 of 20,530
US5616918 Plasma ion mass spectrometer and plasma mass spectrometry using the same
United States Patent
Patent Number: US5616918
Oishi; Konosuke, et al.
Date of Patent: Apr. 1, 1997
PLASMA ION MASS SPECTROMETER AND PLASMA MASS SPECTROMETRY USING THE SAME
Inventors:
- Oishi; Konosuke (Mito, JP)
- Okumoto; Toyoharu (Hitachinaka, JP)
- Tsukada; Masamichi (Higashi, JP)
- Iino; Takashi (Hitachinaka, JP)
Assignee:
- Hitachi, Ltd. (Tokyo, JP; Assignee type: Foreign Company or Corporation)
Appl. Number: 95US-539258
Filed: Oct. 5, 1995Foreign Application Priority Data
Oct. 11, 1994 JP..................................94JP-6-245039
- Int. Cl.-6
- 6-H01J-049-0006
- U.S. Cl.
- 250288000, 250281000, 250282000
- Field of Search
- 250288000, 25028800A, 250281000, 250282000, 250290000, 250291000, 250292000
References Cited
U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS
US4540884 9/1985 Stafford et al..............250282000 US4955717 9/1990 Henderson...................250288000 US5179278 1/1993 Douglas.....................250292000 US5481107 1/1996 Takada et al................250288000OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Spectrochimica Acta, vol. 49B, No. 9, pp. 901-914 Konosuke Oishi et al.: Elemental Mass Spectrometry Using a Nitrogen Microwave-induced Plasma as an Ion Source, May 1994.
Primary Examiner - Berman; Jack I.
Assistant Examiner - Nguyen; Kiet T.
Attorney, Agent, or Firm - Kenyon & KenyonABSTRACT
A plasma ion mass spectrometer capable of improving detection accuracy in mass spectrometry by reducing background noise due to ultraviolet radiation and neutral particles, and a plasma ion mass spectrometry using the same. A sample is ionized with plasma in a plasma generating portion. The flow of the ionized sample is shielded by a shield plate after an elapse of a specified time, and ions of the sample accumulated before the shielding is held in an ion trap type mass spectrometric portion for a specified time. The ions of the sample held for the specified time are then subjected to mass spectrometry. During ions of the sample accumulated before the shielding are held, ultraviolet radiation mixed with the ions of the sample disappears, and thereby only ions of the sample can be subjected to mass spectrometry. As a result, background noise is reduced, to improve detection accuracy in mass spectrometry.
16 Claims, 13 Drawing Figures
* * * * *
The second Internet patent site to be described in this article is one which IBM, the computer manufacturer, has made available to the public at no cost. It is believed IBM is doing this as a general marketing tool and to show the power of its search software for this large database. Whatever the motives and reasons are, the chemical community is benefitting from this web site. This site provides the ability to search patents from the IBM files back to the beginning of January 1971. Images from the patents are available from 1980 onwards. The database of patents comes from IBM's Research Division and is the same database which chemists and patents lawyers at IBM use in their everyday patent work.
Searching can be done by keywords, patent number, inventor, assignee, title, abstract, claim, and agent. It is also possible to do a keyword search "any field" of data or information. Boolean logic is also part of the search capability. There is an advanced search capability which allows one to easily do a combined search for information from different search fields. To test out the system the same search performed on QPAT was done on the IBM patent server, as shown below:
Search Results
Query: ( (mass spectrometry) )
741 patents, out of a total of 2104127 patents, matched your query. The 50 most relevant ones are displayed below. Click on a patent number to view the details of a patent. Select the check boxes of patents you wish to order by fax or mail and then click on the Order button at the bottom.
5616918 : Plasma ion mass spectrometer and plasma mass spectrometry using the same
INTL. CLASS (Ed. 6): H01J 49/06; U.S. CLASS: 250-288; 250-281; 250-282; FIELD OF SEARCH: 250-288,288 A,281,282,290,291,292; AGENTS: Kenyon & Kenyon; ABSTRACT: A plasma ion mass spectrometer capable of improving detection accuracy in mass spectrometry by reducing background noise due to ultraviolet radiation and neutral particles, and a plasma ion mass spectrometry using the same. A sample is ionized with plasma in a plasma generating portion. The flow of the ionized sample is shielded by a shield plate after an elapse of a specified time, and ions of the sample accumulated before the shielding is held in an ion trap type mass spectrometric portion for a specifi ed time. The ions of the sample held for the specified time are then subjected to mass spectrometry. During ions of the sample accumulated before the shielding are held, ultraviolet radiation mixed with the ions of the sample disappears, and thereby only ions of the sample can be subjected to mass spectrometry. As a result, background noise is reduced, to improve detection accuracy in mass spectrometry.
Patent No. Patentee Issue Date 4955717 Henderson Sep. 1 , 1990 4540884 Stafford et al. Sep. 1 , 1985 5481107 Takada et al. Jan. 1 , 1996 5179278 Douglas Jan. 1 , 1993
No patents reference this one 16 CLAIMS: First Claim Shown (Show all claims)
We claim:
- In a plasma ion mass spectrometer comprising:
- a plasma ion source for ionizing a sample with a plasma; and
- a mass spectrometric portion for performing mass spectrometry for said ionized sample;
- the improvement comprising:
- a shielding device for shielding the flow of said ionized sample from said plasma ion source after an elapse of a specified time; and
- a holding device for holding, ions of said sample accumulated before shielding the flow of said ionized sample, for a specified time after shielding the flow of said ionized sample;
- thereby performing mass spectrometry for said ions of said sample held in said holding device.
RELATED U.S. APPLICATIONS: none
FOREIGN APPLICATION PRIORITY DATA:
Application No. Country Date 6-245039 Japan Oct. 11, 1994
- Spectrochimica Acta, vol. 49B, No. 9, pp. 901-914 Konosuke Oishi et al.: Elemental Mass Spectrometry Using a Nitrogen Microwave-induced Plasma as an Ion Source, May 1994.
PRIMARY/ASSISTANT EXAMINERS: Berman; Jack I.; Nguyen; Kiet T.
ADDED TO DATABASE: Apr. 2 , 1997
In summary, these two services are both easy to use and useful. Looking at the two outputs of this patent by Oishi, Konosuke, et al, the basic information, including the abstract is the same. The main general difference between these two systems is that the free IBM database of all US patents back to 1971 is much larger than the free QPAT file while the QPAT system has more search features. For a first search of the patent literature either of these two are worth looking at.
©1997 Elsevier Science B.V.
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