Thank you for this interesting question. We are well aware that some more explanations need to be communicated to the users and we are working on it.
The coma has normally no functional impact in Espacenet and will give the same effect as a space. In the queries' context provided, it will then be interpreted as the Boolean operator
AND.
Also, if no field identifier is put before a word, Espacenet will interpret that you want to search the word with the field identifier
nftxt by default (i.e.
All text fields or names).
So, the query
in="shultz john w" AND ta=enzyme,protein is interpreted as
in="shultz john w" AND ta=enzyme AND nftxt=protein.
And the query
in="shultz john w" AND ta=protein,enzyme is interpreted as
in="shultz john w" AND ta=protein AND nftxt=enzyme.
This explain the difference in the number of retrieved records.
In case you would like to have both terms,
protein and
enzyme, to be searched with the field identifier
ta (i.e.
Title or abstract), then you need to query in one of the following equivalent ways in
Smart search:
- in="shultz john w" AND ta=enzyme AND ta=protein, or
- in="shultz john w" AND ta all "enzyme protein"
Although not related to the use of comas, I wanted to mention that the query
in="shultz john w" will not find publications where the inventor has been encoded as "Schultz John" or "John Schultz" in our database.
To find these alternatives, you may use
in="shultz john" (but this will not find "John Schultz", if encoded in this way, because with this query, which use the operator
=, the two search terms will be searched exactly in the written order) or broaden it to
in all "shultz john" instead (same effect as the query
in=shultz AND in=john), knowing, however, that it could also generate some noise. Another way would be: (
in="shultz john" or in="john shultz").
Finally, I noticed that the use of the coma in the above mentioned context generated an unwished behaviour in Advanced search. And this needs to be fixed. In the Advanced search equivalent queries - which should always be synchronised with the Smart search queries - the addition of a coma indeed prevented the term following the coma to be included in the Advanced search query (see screenshots below). I will inform the technical team about this bug.
Kind regards,
Andrée
Patent Information Marketing