Search Non-Patent Literature

Orbit Intelligence contains a non-patent literature (NPL) collection and you can retrieve an NPL result based on your patent search. After running a patent search, you will have a tab to access these results results on the right. The search result is generated on the fly once you click the NPL tab.

How is the NPL search result generated?

Orbit Intelligence carries out an automatic search in the NPL collection. There are two possible scenarios.

1) If you patent search query contains keywords, the automatic search on NPL will use the same keywords to search the NPL collection. The keywords are searched in the title, abstract and keyword section within the NPL.

2) If your patent search query does not contain keywords, for example a search on an applicant name or if you are displaying a saved list, the search engine will carry out a similarity search based the content of the data set.

Information displayed

Hitlist: The NPL hitlist contains the title and the first lines of the abstract. It is sorted by relevance by default, but you can re-sort by publication date. In the screenshot below note the pulldown in the upper left side to re-sort.

Preview tab: In the preview tab you will find the title and full abstract as well as meta data such as keywords, type of scientific work, e.g. Conference proceeding in the screenshot, and author(s). A link to the respective journal or publication is also provided to access the full text of the document. If the full text is hosted on an open access database, the user can download it at no cost. If it redirects to a private publisher website, the user will need to pay for the pdf document , login using an existing subscription to access the full text or do a web search of the article to potentially find a free full text version.

You can find more information about the coverage of the NPL collection in Orbit Intelligence in the article “What is the coverage of the Non Patent Literature (NPL) database”

NOTE: Our new and improved Advanced Search is different than the one on this video. An updated video will soon be available.