Error 8406

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dhfriese
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Sep 10, 2021 10:01 am

Error 8406

Post by dhfriese » Fri Sep 10, 2021 10:08 am

Dear EPO support team,

I am new to the use of the EPO online bulletin search and I am busy with developing search strings. I have now encountered a weird error which I do not understand and I hope to find a solution therefore.

If I search with the following string

(TTLG=*non* /1W *woven* ) AND (PUB1=20210908)

I do not get any result but the search works. However, if I change one of the words to "poly" such as

(TTLG=*non* /1W *poly* ) AND (PUB1=20210908)

I am encountering error 8406 and I am required to render my search more definite ("Bitte verfeinern Sie Ihre Abfrage" in German). This also occurs if I reduce "poly" to "pol" or "po". Does anybody know what is going wrong there and what could be done to solve this problem? Thanks in advance to anybody who takes the effort to answer.


EPO / EPAL Team
Posts: 141
Joined: Mon Dec 22, 2014 8:30 am

Re: Error 8406

Post by EPO / EPAL Team » Mon Sep 13, 2021 11:22 am

Dear dhfriese

We reproduce your issue, e.g. with TTLG=*non* /1W *poly*
It is due to a search limitation when combining proximity with left and right truncations.

Some comments:
- left/right truncations should be used when appropriate, i.e. not systematically - for example *non* does return documents including Benzophenone, i.e. not only documents including "non" (not this or that) - in other words, the simultaneous use of left and right truncations could trigger some noise in your search result
- should you want to keep the simultaneous use of left and right truncations and knowing that titles are usually short, you could try replacing /1w with AND when getting error 8406
- as you are searching with title terms, you may consider using EP full-text search (also free of charge) that has much more searchable text compared with EP Bulletin search

Does this information help?

User support


EPO / EPAL Team
Posts: 141
Joined: Mon Dec 22, 2014 8:30 am

Re: Error 8406

Post by EPO / EPAL Team » Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:02 am

Dear dhfriese,

Query 1 : (TTLG=*non* /1W *woven* ) AND (PUB1=20210908)
searching for all German titles containing (TTLG= *woven* ) only returns 19 results.
Users normally try to search very broadly and then refine their search. For instance, the following query will return 4305 results because it includes English titles (TTLE or TTLG= *woven* or nonwoven*)

To get more German keywords, you can display the 4305 results and customise the Result list to include the German titles. You can now refine your search as you like e.g
(( TTLG= *woven* or nonwoven* ) or (TTLG = (gewebte? or gewobe*) +3W (Textil* or produkt* or faser*)))

Query 2 : (TTLG=*non* /1W *poly* ) AND (PUB1=20210908)
There are many ways to write a truncation. However, you can often verify your query by comparing results.
For instance (TTLG= *poly* or "non-poly*") will return the same number of results as (TTLG=*non* /1W *poly* )
Finally to make sur that the results are really the same, you can use the operator ANDNOT
$59 andnot $60 returns 0 result, where $59 stands for the query ID of (TTLG= *poly* or "non-poly*") and $60 stands for the query ID of (TTLG=*non* /1W *poly* )


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