Information Today
Volume 17, Issue 10 • November 2000
Questel•Orbit Launches PlusPat
Questel•Orbit, Inc. has announced the introduction of PlusPat, a new product covering more than 30 million worldwide patent documents. PlusPat is available through both Questel•Orbit’s online and Internet services.

According to the announcement, PlusPat combines the European Patent Office’s (EPO) worldwide collection with U.S. and Japanese patent information, resulting in the only service to offer merged European and U.S. classification systems to worldwide patents as far back as the 1920s.

PlusPat also offers the following:

“The well-known USPTO [United States Patent and Trademark Office], EPO, and International Patent classification systems are all provided in this file. In particular, the EPO classification allows users to conduct very accurate and comprehensive world-wide prior-art subject searches,” said David Dickens, director of patents business at Questel•Orbit and manager of the PlusPat project. “Along with more than 9 million English abstracts, the subject-searching capabilities in this file are absolutely unique. These features provide great value to technology researchers and to intellectual-property professionals.”

PlusPat records combine all the publication stages for a patent/publication, from unexamined application to the examined application and the granted patent, including the publication stage descriptions. PlusPat also has formats that display a summary of the patent/publication, giving users a concise way to look at the information.

Another PlusPat feature is the availability of ECLA (European patent CLAssification) coding. The ECLA codes are based on the IPC (International Patent Classification) codes but are more specific, with over 80,000 additional subdivisions, and are updated monthly and retrospectively applied.

PlusPat’s patent-family search capability, including the legal status information and the family-equivalents data, allows a family command to be performed against a set of records. In addition to the existing family-results display, PlusPat merges all of the related family equivalents into one record. The new, family search and display command MFAM (Merged Family) is currently under development and will be available later this year.

All existing Questel•Orbit searching capabilities and display features are also available within PlusPat, including the following:

Source: Questel•Orbit, Inc., McLean, VA, 703/442-0900; http://www.questelorbit.com.
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