FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany, is offering the Chinese full-text patent file CNFULL on online science and patent information service STN. This is projected to enable researchers and patent specialists to broaden their complex patent searches to Chinese patent full-texts in order to determine patentability, state of the art, infringement and licensing possibilities.
It has been observed that with China having grown into one of the world's major patenting countries, it is extremely important for all companies involved in R&D to keep an eye on the developments in Asia, and at the same time to protect their products and inventions in this region accordingly.
At present, the CNFULL file comprises over 4.5 million records and more than 3.8 million images from 1985 onwards. More than 10,000 new documents are added to the file each week. Each database record contains all documents published for one application. Online thesauri for the International Patent Classification (/IPC) and the European Patent Classification (/EPC) are searchable. Abstracts are initially machine translated and replaced three months later by human translated text; descriptions and claims are machine translated.
The Numeric Property Search feature, developed by FIZ Karlsruhe and already used in other full-text patent files on STN, is also available in CNFULL. It enables users to search the numeric values of over 30 physical and chemical properties in almost 400 unit variants within the full text of all documents and thus significantly enhances the search precision in many cases.
STN is jointly operated by FIZ Karlsruhe (Europe) and Chemical Abstracts Service (USA), and is represented in Japan by JAICI. CNFULL is seen as a valuable addition to STN's wide range of full-text patent databases from all over the world.
