A comparison of official abstracts and enhanced abstracts for patent search

The official abstracts published together with many patent applications are freely available for search, e.g. using patent office websites such as Espacenet or search engines. Some service providers also offer, for a price, their own enhanced abstracts of patent applications. The authors propose a way of making an objective comparison between searching using the official abstracts and using the enhanced abstracts. The advantages offered by enhanced abstracts will be explained and include simple benefits such as saving time in finding the relevant prior art, and more intricate ones such as better suitability for ranking techniques.