Searching patents .....

[babaji.ghule]

Respected Sir,
Its a very good platform for searching patents. But if we want to search with synonyms then there is lot of difficulty. Because it has not sufficient entry permission if synonyms of terms greater than 10. It is possible that certain term has 40 synonyms (Case in my search). Manual permutation and combination is time consuming process.
Also if the algorithm designed to search with synonyms automatically then it will be very helpful for researcher to meet desire goal. Hope the query is understandable. Rest is helpful.

[Patent Information Marketing]

Dear user,
As you mention already unfortunately Espacenet does not allow to put many synonyms to be searched against the same field. For more advanced searches we recommend to use the EPO's subscription product Global Patent Index (GPI), where such limitations do not exist. GPI offers great advantages also for monitoring patents and checking the quality of your searches (see also the GPI forum). You can also test GPI for free.

The following tips can help you to mitigate the problem in Espacenet:

• Use of truncation symbols (to include for plurals e.g. test?). However, please check the quality of your searches when using the truncation symbols (e.g. test* may produce many unwanted hits and noise).

• Search up to 20 terms in different combination fields: e.g. search some words in title, abstract or claims and others in title and abstracts and analyse the difference when swapping the terms.

• Make use of classification symbols rather than too many key words: Technical concepts can often be very well captured with classification symbols rather than with key words (e.g. life boat? with B63C9/00). The advantages of the classification searches are that they have been assigned by experts and that they are language independent.

• Combine results of different queries: It is helpful to export your results to excel when combining the results of different queries. You may have the problem that different queries find different publications of the the same simple patent family. You can use the family ID in the Excel export to deduplicate result list from different queries (sort by family ID and identify duplicates with Excel.)

For more information please consult the Espacenet pocket guide.

Hopefully you find the above helpful.