What is TechDiscovery?
TechDiscovery allows you to quickly get to the list of the most relevant families for your patent research or analysis and easily refine these if necessary. Skip the search part, and get straight to the data and analysis you require.
You can use either patent numbers / patent family numbers or text to begin a search. The text can be either a simple description of the technology, a longer form technical information (e.g. your own unpublished patents), or even product descriptions or patent paragraphs from competitors. You can also use a combination of both patent examples and text (where possible).
For more information on TechDiscovery use cases and data input, please review our suggested articles.
Step by Step Image Walk Through
1) When you first log in, you'll be presented with the TechDiscovery Search page.
You have the option when you first start using the TechDiscovery platform, to 'Use privately' or 'Keep search history'. 'Use privately' means that you cannot access your own previous searches in your account, whereas 'Keep search history' means that you can.
If you select the option to keep search history, the 'Pinned and Recent Searches' option operates like the report history and allows you to review your recent and saved TechDiscovery searches in the platform.
You can also keep ad-hoc searches private by selecting 'Do not save searches' here. These will not show in your recent searches:
2) Next, enter your search criteria whether that's:
- Patent numbers
- A Technology, for example, noise cancelling headphones
- Paragraphs of Text, for example, a quote from a patent abstract, or a detailed description of an invention.
Use a new row for each criteria type. Your search criteria is the basis for finding similar patents. In this example, I'm going to enter in two patent numbers and 'Noise cancelling headphones' as my technology.
3) Select 'Search'. By default, TechDiscovery will generate a list of 1000 similar patent families to the search criteria. Results are given a similarity score between 0 and 100, with the highest scoring patent families showing at the top.
4) You do have the ability to 'add more text' to your search retrospectively, should you wish to add a paragraph of text to the search for example (or add a technology name should your search have originally started with a paragraph of text).
This helps to refine the search. Here I'm going to add some text from an existing patent family which I deem to be relevant to the technology I'm looking for. Click 'Apply and update'.
5) Next, select patent families in the 'similar patent families' list that you decide are most relevant to the search criteria you entered, by clicking the 'plus' icon. This will help train the search with yet more good examples. Use the minus icon to simply remove non relevant examples from your results, or if you're unsure on certain examples, you can use the Review Later button to store these away.
You can do this based on the information you can see in the list view, or select the icon below to view the full patent family details.
This will open in a separate tab for you to review and then return to the TechDiscovery view.
Handy Hint: The 'magnifying glass' icon shown next to this allows you to start a new TechDiscovery search from that patent family.
The search bar at the top of the results (shown above) can be used to filter results to specific keywords (see boolean search guide at the 'i' next to the search field) in order to, for example, add patent families to the relevant or irrelevant selections.
6) Select 'apply and update' to refine your results based on these updates. You can perform a couple of iterations of this process to generate more relevant results.
7) You also have the option to 'export' the results of similar patent families. When selecting to 'export' you in fact, have these options:
- Download to CSV or Excel
Allows you to download the results whether you want to review various pieces of data such as first filing country or publication date; to share the list with others; or import to another platform.
- Copy Family Representative or All Family Members
Provides the option to copy the list of results to clipboard.
You can either copy the Patent family representative which is the representative publication of each family that has the most detail or relevant information compared to other publications in the family.
The other option is to copy all family members, of the list.
8) Remember, you had the option when you first start using the TechDiscovery platform, to save the searches or keep them private. If you chose to save your searches, the 'Pinned and Recent Searches' option allows you to review your recent and saved TechDiscovery searches in the platform. All searches are saved for 30 days but if you 'pin' your search it will be saved in your pinned searches.
9) If you wish to change these preferences, they can be amended in your settings via the three dot icon here: