Non-Patent Literature Search is it necessary?

There is a tremendous increase in the NPL citations and have acquired equal emphasis when compared to performing patent citations studies. NPL will be cited as a prior art for patent application / granted patents in European patent registry or WIPO International Search Report documents. So it is essential to do NPL citation search while conducting prior art searches or invalidity searches to understand and identify the technology and novelty of the patents in contention.

Patent cooperation has been developed over many years by the world’s leading patent offices, providing open access to both their own datasets and the shared collections of other offices, such as the Patentscope database of the World Intellectual Property Organization or the Espacenet database of the European Patent Office. In the area of citations, there is the five IP office cooperation project, made up of the offices in Europe, the United States of America, Japan, Korea and China, whose aim is to improve patent examination processes, with services and applications such as the Common Citation Document (CCD) citation consultation tool or the Global Dossier initiative, which provides access to documents associated with the  process of granting patents, including lists of bibliographic references submitted by the applicant and examiner, as well as the terms and classifications used in the Prior Art search. Other open sources of information in which NPL citations can be consulted are the specialized patent search engines that compile large collections of data, such as Google Patents or Lens.org, which, in addition to providing information on NPL references, also have tools for analysing the data, such as maps connecting articles and patents through citation networks in which the influence of scientific research on inventions can be observed.

NPL is assigned with reference numbers such as XP followed by serial number of maximum nine digits; eg: XP000012345 in Espacenet. One can use this number and can search in smart search in Espacenet database.

Also one can use DOI (digital object identifier) in smart search box in Espacenet for searching particular NPL.

Patent offices like USPTO, EPO, JPO also have in-house databases to search NPLs for effective examination of patent applications. EPO has more than 30,000 NPL documents that can be searched and analysed for any kind of IP search.

From the academic/scientific point of view, NPL citations provide information on the impact of scientific production cited in patents, on questions related to the productivity of authors, evaluation of journals, influence and cooperation of research institutions, or citation averages by discipline.