Scientific information services provider FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany, has released the new bibliographic patent family file INPAFAMDB (International Patent Family Database) on STN International. Data sources of INPAFAMDB are the EPO Patent Information Resource that currently covers 81 patent authorities, and the INPADOC legal status file covering 51 authorities. INPAFAMDB currently contains about 36 million patent families with 65 million publications dating back to the early 19th Century. The family data has been quality-improved by FIZ Karlsruhe.
A patent family comprises all worldwide patent publications belonging to one invention. Thus it provides valuable insights, such as where a particular invention is brought to market and in which countries the patent owner is active.
INPAFAMDB records contain bibliographic information for all family members from 81 patent authorities, including 12.6 million English abstracts for 8.5 million families; fully integrated legal status for 51 patent authorities, including the seven categories assigned by FIZ Karlsruhe to simplify legal status searches; and citations from 13 patent authorities.
Coverage for the most important industrialised countries reaches back to the 19th century: the US (1836), the UK (1840), Germany (1879), France (1900), and Japan (1944). With its coverage of 81 authorities and its invention-based search indexes, INPAFAMDB is projected to be especially useful for performing comprehensive prior-art searches in primary data using free-text (terms from titles and abstracts) and/or classifications (IPC, ECLA, ICO, IDT and national classifications including US). For a better overview and in order to reduce the information overload, display formats with de-duplicated content have been created.
