Patents Citation Index™ (PCI) is a unique database of examiner citations, both patent and literature from 1973 to date. Coverage has been enhanced over time and currently covers 10 major patenting authorities, i.e. Belgium, European Patent Office, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, World/PCT. Prior to May 1997, examiner and author citations were provided for 16 patent-issuing authorities. PCI provides access to 98 million patent and 11 million literature citations found in more than 8 million patent families. Every 3-4 days, new Examiner citations, both patent and literature, from about 10,000 documents are added to the file.
The PCI database is meant as a companion file to the DWPI and is amenable to extensive citation searching. Clearly focussing on citations makes for a leaner and easier to use database. Therefore classification data like the International Patent Classification or text data have only been provided in the database to a very limited extent. The main access point to the wealth of citation data is likely to be either patent assignee or inventor data or document identifiers already known to the searcher. For convenience the Derwent value-added title is provided with each invention. Exploiting citation relationships can serve to explore the wider background of an invention for technology survey or possible infringements beyond the patent family, but it can also serve to monitor competitors, or compile statistics on technology trends etc.
PCI contains bibliographic patent family data from the Derwent World Patents Index and all patents and literature cited by examiners, as well as references to citing patents. A list of Thomson Scientific assigned company codes for patent assignees matched with company names is available as an online thesaurus.
Coverage includes all patent-relevant areas of science and technology.
record in the database describes a patent family for a single invention. Patent citations referenced by examiners in the patent documents are called "cited" patents in the PCI record. When a citation references an older invention/patent, it is also added to the older family record as a "citing" patent. The PCI record provides a view of retrospective technology for an invention (cited patents) and its impact on subsequent technology (citing patents).
You can also cross-reference into Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) for more information about patent citations of interest. Applications for PCI include novelty searching, gathering documentation to support patent applications, and monitoring for patent infringements by yourself or a competitor.
Features
- Covers examiner citations (for both patent and literature references) appearing in patents for all technologies from six patent-issuing authorities: DE (including utility models), EP, GB, JP, US, and WO (PCT). In the new PCI coverage of BE, FR and NL examiner citations is resumed, and ES ones are being added.
- For the time period between updates 9418-9719 Examiner and Inventor citations are available from 16 patent-issuing authorities: AT, AU, BE, CA, CH, DE, EP, FR, GB, JP, NL, NZ, SE, US, WO (PCT), ZA.
- Bibliographic information with enhanced patent titles. All records contain patent family information and details of examiner citations
- Each record includes a listing of any other patent in the database which cites it ("citing patents")
- Extensive cross-filing capabilities, e.g. PCI has the same accession number as DWPI.
- Extra data (e.g. assignee, inventors) given for cited/citing patents
- Updated every 3 to 4 days (82 updates per year)
The PCI file will be available on STN as of February 17, 2008. The DPCI file it replaces will still be available for another four weeks as a static file. During this period existing procedures can be adjusted to the new, enhanced file environment.
The new features:
- extended coverage (BE, ES, FR, NL added)
- stopwords are no longer used
- additional priority application numbers
- additional Thomson Scientific standard application numbers (/APTS and /PRTS)
- data content streamlined to focus on citation searching (Derwent indexing and IPC's have been removed)
- as much backward compatibility with DPCI as possible