The Structured Search is another way to refine your search from the very start and gives you unique options for searching for text within specific fields of each document. Using the Structured Search tools, you can create specific search queries, filtering by dates, jurisdictions and document type. Also, alteration of default search parameters such as stemming, family grouping, query language and whether to only include documents with full text can be done. This search also allows you to limit your search terms to specific sections of documents.
By searching for terms only within a given field, you can greatly reduce the number of extraneous results. For example, searching for an inventor’s name only within the Inventor field will eliminate documents that happen to mention the inventor in passing. With this search, you have the option to use the Boolean operator “AND” or “OR” between fields. Structured Search also allows you to limit your search terms to specific sections of documents. By searching for terms only within a given field, you can greatly reduce the number of extraneous results.
Location
You can get to the Structured Search page at any time by clicking the “New Patent Search” button on the home page or on the dropdown menu next to the search button on the search results page. “New Structured Search” button is also available on the filter pane in each Lens page. Clicking on the button will led to the structured search page.
How to Use
Query (a)
In the query field you can choose which section of each document you would like your search terms applied to. You can choose between the sections: Inventors, Owners (US), Title, Abstract, Claims, Applicants, Authors, Citation ID, Non Patent Citations, ORCID works citations, Lens ID, Publication Number, Filing Number as well as US and IPCR Classifications. You can add any number of these fields and combine them all using a boolean AND or OR predicate.
Selecting AND will mean a document must have at least one match for each term in the section it is being searched on to be added to the search results. Selecting OR will mean a document must have at least one of the terms matches in the section it is being searched on to be added to the search results.
Dates (b)
You can use this section to search for only documents that were published or filed between a specific date range. You can select this date range using the in-built calendar or enter it in year-month-day format (eg. 1969-07-21).
Classifications (c)
The lens has enabled exploration based on patent classification system that allows one to search either by a keyword or by classification code in any of the three patent classification systems; Cooperative patent classification (CPC, 201802 version), International Patent Classification (IPC, 20180101 version) and The United States Patent Classification (USPC, 201502 version).
ORCID Works Citations (d)
You can easily search for patents citing the works recorded in ORCID records. Just enter one or more ORCID IDs and the Lens will automatically extract the article DOIs or PMIDs listed in the researcher’s ORCID record (if that researcher has voluntarily made their profile public) and add them to the search query. If you need to perform a more in-depth citation analysis, such as evaluation of which article is cited in which patent, we recommend you check the PatCite app wherein you can enter a list of the article IDs and analyse the citing patents per each cited article and also examine their patent family network.
Jurisdictions (e)
You can use this section to restrict your results to documents from selected jurisdictions, or to exclude selected jurisdictions.
Document Type (f)
You can use this section to limit your search to specific document types.
Languages (g)
To search in a language other than English, use this option.
Options (h)
This section allows you to change some search parameters.
- The “Full Text” option will limit your search to only documents which have full text available.
- The “One doc per family” will group your results into simple families, showing only one result from each (this may disrupt the result count and slow down the “select all documents” feature on the search result page).
- Stemming of results can be turned on or off, by default it is turned on. Stemming is an algorithm which modifies your search so only the “stems” of words are checked. For example, with stemming on the words: “run”, “runner” and “running” are all stemmed to the word “run” and treated the same in both the query and in target documents. With stemming turned on you will get more results at the cost of some accuracy, and when it is turned off you will have higher accuracy but might miss close results. Note that wildcard search terms may not work as expected for searches where Stemming is turned on. Wildcard terms are not stemmed and therefore may not match against the stemmed values in the search index. For example, “runn*” won’t match “runner”or “running” with Stemming turned on. Read more about stemming on wikipedia.
- In Patents, you can also query the unstemmed fields directly to create combination queries of stemmed and unstemmed terms. For example, the query
title.en.text.unstemmed:roads title:brakingwith stemming enabled would only stem the second termbraking, e.g. https://www.lens.org/lens/search/patent/list?q=title.en.text.unstemmed:roads%20title:braking&stemmed=true. Explicit specification of language and stemming will work for the following multi-lingual patent fields:titleabstractclaimdescriptionfull_text
- Query language allows you to change the language your queries are entered in. This will have an effect on how the queries are interpreted (including how stemming is processed).