1 Introduction

1.1 To the audience

Do you want to efficiently manage your product development process for an innovative product? Do you want to avoid potential costly issues after market introduction of an innovative product?

Using information from patents in a timely manner is useful to help you make technical and business decisions throughout the development process and avoid potential issues after market introduction.

To help you find this information, this document presents an introduction into the theoretical background of searching in patent databases.

It is useful for both the novice and more experienced searcher in patent databases to understand the background of choices that have to be made during the searching. These choices have to be made to perform an efficient search and to be able to answer the questions of the search with sufficient quality.

It is not expected that a novice searcher will understand all background information. It will therefore be useful to reread this document at a moment when more experience with searching is achieved.

With experience and the information in this document you should be able to find patent documents efficiently and answer the search questions with sufficient quality.

1.2 What is a search?

Nowadays everyone uses internet search engines, such as Google, to find information. These search engines have algorithms to show the most relevant results first. This is sufficient for most everyday questions.

Finding mainly technical information for research and development requires results that are sufficiently complete, whereby the extent and depth of this information is not known at the outset. These results are very difficult to achieve the way the search engines on the internet work.

The basic knowledge required to find this information for research and development in the patent databases is covered in basics. This basic knowledge gives you the means to select a workable set from the enormous amount of patent documents.

A first overview of the search process can already be given:

The first part of searching is:

Selecting a set from the enormous amount of patent documents that can be treated in a certain time.

The second part is:

Selecting the relevant documents from this first set.

The most difficult part in this process is:

Knowing when to stop.

1.3 Relevant information

The questions to be answered that arise during the research and development process, determine which information is relevant. Defining these questions and relevant information is covered in other manuals, such as the patent landscaping analysis manual.

The required relevant information has a major influence on a successful result, but usually has little influence on the method of searching. The basic knowledge described herein therefore applies to many search questions.