The text, the full text and nothing but the text: Part 1 – Standards for creating textual information in patent documents and general search implications

Effective searching of electronic full texts of patent documents requires both appropriate search engine technology and high quality source documents. This article reviews the impact of both the historical development of online searching and of document preparation upon the resulting databases. Many standards were developed at a time when patent documents were wholly paper-based, and may no longer be suitable as current guidelines for the preparation of full text electronic databases. Part 1 reviews the text contained in patent titles, abstracts, citations and claims, to understand the challenges of using these document elements for patent retrieval. Part 2 concentrates on aspects of the main body of the specification, and whether new methods of document preparation and retrieval will improve patent search quality.