Multiple items in NPL_BIBLIO strings

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Jos.Winnink
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2015 8:39 pm

Multiple items in NPL_BIBLIO strings

Post by Jos.Winnink » Thu Apr 16, 2015 9:01 pm

Dear all,

Working on table TLS214_NPL_PUBLN from PATSTAT2014b I found that 107,000+ NPL_BIBLIO strings contain multiple 'information items' in the same string. The 'information items' seem to be separated by the character string -&.

For example:
# NPL_PUBLN_ID, NPL_BIBLIO
'2152189', 'DATABASE NCBI NUCLEOTIDE AND PROTEIN SEQUENCES, Bethesda, MA, US 20-09-00 AC = CAB95124. HYPOTHETICAL 61.4 KDA PROTEIN. Horiuchi M. & Betz H.; \'Human homologue of Ulip6.\'; XP002152189 -& HORIUCHI ET AL., : FEBS LETTERS, vol. 440, no. 2-3, 1 septembre 2000 (2000-09-01), pages 283-286, XP002153535'

My observations lead to the following questions?
1. What is the rationale behind the storing of multiple information items in the same string?
2. If multiple items are stored in one and the same string are they always separated by the string -&?

Sincerely,

Jos Winnink (CWTS - Leiden University)


mkracker
Posts: 120
Joined: Wed Sep 04, 2013 6:17 am
Location: Vienna

Re: Multiple items in NPL_BIBLIO strings

Post by mkracker » Fri Apr 24, 2015 11:04 am

Thank you, Jos, for that interesting question. I checked with the expert, and indeed I learned something myself:

The short answer: Corresponding documents are documents which have the same or substantially the same technical content, so they are stored in the same string, separated by the string “-&” .

The longer answer:
When an examiner is citing a document during the search or examination phase, and the document which is being cited is NOT an original document but a database or an abstract made available by third party, for this document the examiner is mentioning the information provided by third party (name of database, acc. number etc.) as first part and the source or corresponding document (main article: journal name, vol, nr, pages etc. ) information as second part. And these two parts of information are separated by an ‘&’ sign.

Other typical examples of corresponding documents that should be mentioned in the Search Report:
- One document of the patent family is published in a non-EPO language before the priority date of the application, whereas a different member of the patent family is published in an EPO language after the priority date of the application. In this case, the earliest publication will be cited and the later publication will be mentioned as &-document
- Abstracts of documents where the original document is not easily available or in an non-EPO language. If only the abstract of a document is cited, the original document will be cited as &-document
SearchReportWithCorrespondingNPs.png
Corresponding documents in a search report
SearchReportWithCorrespondingNPs.png (51.35 KiB) Viewed 1481 times
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Martin Kracker / EPO


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