Automating the search for a patent's prior art with a full text similarity search

More than ever, technical inventions are the symbol of our society's advance. Patents guarantee their creators protection against infringement. For an invention being patentable, its novelty and inventiveness have to be assessed. Therefore, a search for published work that describes similar inventions to a given patent application needs to be performed. Currently, this so-called search for prior art is executed with semi-automatically composed keyword queries, which is not only time consuming, but also prone to errors. In particular, errors may systematically arise by the fact that different keywords for the same technical concepts may exist across disciplines. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed, where the full text of a given patent application is compared to existing patents using machine learning and natural language processing techniques to automatically detect inventions that are similar to the one described in the submitted document. Various state-of-the-art approaches for feature extraction and document comparison are evaluated. In addition to that, the quality of the current search process is assessed based on ratings of a domain expert. The evaluation results show that our automated approach, besides accelerating the search process, also improves the search results for prior art with respect to their quality

Bibliometric mapping as a science policy and research management tool

Bibliometric maps of science are landscapes of scientific research fields created by quantitative analysis of bibliographic data. In such maps the 'cities' are, for instance, research topics. Topics with a strong cognitive relation are in each other's vicinity and topics with a weak relation are distant from each other. These maps have several domains of application. As a policy supportive tool they can be applied to overview the structure of a research field and to monitor its evolution. This book contributes to the development of this application of bibliometric maps.CWTSFSW - CWTS - Ou

Patent Law: An Open-Access Casebook

Patent Law: An Open-Access Casebook is a comprehensive casebook covering all the fundamentals of the United States patent system. It is designed to be used as the primary text in a 3-credit or 4-credit patent law course. Any portion of the casebook may also, of course, be used separately. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. If you are interested in preparing a derivative work, please contact the authors.The Table of Contents for the book is as follows: 1. Introduction 2. The Invention, the Patent, and the Claim 3. Patentable Subject Matter 4. Utility 5. Disclosure 6. Novelty 7. Nonobviousness 8. Claim Construction 9. Infringement 10. Defenses 11. Plants 12. Designs 13. Post-Grant Proceedings 14. Remedie