20 reasons why Ambercite is better than other sources of citation data
Patent citation search data is available from many patent data sources, and in some cases for free. Given this, we sometimes get asked - what added value can Ambercite provide?
This is a great question - and in response, we have identified 20 reasons why Ambercite is better than other sources of patent citation data. But before we look at these, lets look at what is available from a free and commonly used patent data source, namely Google Patent.
What data about citations can you get from Google patent?
As a case study we will run a search in Google Patent for US10266850B2, one of the earliest Crispr patents. The page in Google shows a reference to 203 (backward) patent citations, and 584 forward patent citations (‘cited by’).
So if you were interested in looking for similar patents to US10266850B2, you would have plenty of patents to look at.
And before Ambercite became available, I used these free sources of patent citation data often, and it could be helpful at times.
How good is that!
Well…there is a catch. Let’s have a look at the 203 backward citations, at least the top six of these:
And there are about 197 more such patents. But even just looking at these six patents, the following questions come to mind:
Can I see more details about each of these patents? In an easier to review format?
What if I want to add date filters?
What if I want to look at both the forward and backward citations, at the same time?
And if I did want to look at the 787 forward or backward citations - where would I start? Surely, some are more relevant than others. I don’t really want to look at 787 patents - instead I want to look for the most similar patents to US10266850B2.
Hmm… if only there was a way to access the power of citation data, while being able to overcome the above disadvantages.
This exactly is why Ambercite was created - and in the process, Ambercite has produced a number of other benefits. We will review these below.
20 features of Ambercite compared to conventional citation searching
The list below shows the 20 benefits of Ambercite compared to other sources of patent citation data. And we acknowledge that while some other sources of patent citation data may have some of these features, we have yet to see other sources that have all of these features.
1) Search results are ranked
Rather than just producing a list of results, Ambercite ranks the results using our innovative and unique citation based similarity algorithm. The highest ranked patents are more likely to be relevant, given their many known and unknown citations. Note that these patents in the table below are ranked by their Similarity Scores (third column), with the higher the better.
2) You can review both ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ citations
Most importantly, and unlike any other patent database or tool, Ambercite can predict relevant documents that our algorithm thinks should have been cited - but were in fact not cited by an examiner or applicant, i.e. not found by other searchers. These 'documents we call ‘unknown’ citations. Our long standing customers may remember these as ‘ghost’ citations.
An example of an unknown patent, ie. not ever cited, is shown as the second patent in the list below. They appear to be relevant to the Crispr technology:
3) The search interface is based on citations, and is fast and easy to use and learn
We have carefully designed the graphical user interface to be as simple and intuitive to use as possible, without the range of confusing options sometimes found in some other patent databases.
The query for the above search is shown below - simple enter the patent number, and hit the “Find Similar Patents” button. If in doubt, click on this image, and this will take you to an interactive version of this query, and its results.
4) The results are easy to review in the Patent Review Panel
You can review the patents in either table form, or in the ‘Panel Review Panel. To open the Patent Review Panel, you simply have to click on any image or Title/Abstract. You can then scroll these records one-by-one using the Up and Down arrow keys. See an example below:
To open up the Patent Review Panel, simply click on any Picture or Title and Abstract field.
5) You can base your search on one or more query patents
Sometimes rather than starting from one query patent, you want to start from a group of patents, for example, the best known patents you can find for an invention. These could be the closest patents found from a conventional search, or maybe a patent being invalidated.
Ambercite allows you to start from 1 up to 200 starting patents:
You can even weight this towards the query patents you think are most important.
In the extract below, the second patent is weighted 2:1 compared to the first patent (which has the default weighting of 1).
All of the related patent network graphs of that higher weighted patent will now be impacted by this.
6) You can exclude Known citations from the list, so only looking at patents not previously cited
By applying a filter to the results box, we can focus the results purely on ‘Unknown’ and relevant patents not previously seen - and example of this is shown below.
7) When you see a patent that you like, you can Promote it into the Search box
While reviewing patents in Ambercite, you might see a patent that you think will improve the search outcomes. In Ambercite you can ‘promote’ these patents into the search box using the Promote button (available in the Patent Review Panel).
Promoted patents in the Search box are highlighted in blue, for your reference:
This allows you to ‘iterate’ your way through to the final set of the best results, including your ability to provide a weighting for those patents you subjectively think are twice or 100 times or half as relevant.
8) Ambercite remembers the patents you have already reviewed - so you don’t need to review them again
This can make reviewing of patents when running multiple queries more efficient.
As an example of this, a follow-up query for a search produced 50 results as requested, but only only 6 of these where new. By selecting the New Patents as shown below, you can focus your valuable time on patents you have not already seen:
9) You can highlight keywords to make the results easier to review
As shown below. You can even wildcard characters when listing words to highlight:
10) You can apply filters to the results
For example, in the image below a filter is being applied to limit results to those referring to ‘Crispr’ in either the title or abstract.
You can also filter by:
Known or unknown citation
Representative patent
Priority or publication date
CPC code
11) Patents are grouped by families - and citation links are combined.
Ambercite groups patents into simple* patent families, and also combines all of the citations links for the different family members. This brings a number of benefits:
You can run a patent search from any family member, and end up with the same results
The citation data pulls citation links posted by any patent office, so the depth and quality of citation data is improved.
*A simple patent family is all patents that share the same priority documents.
12) You can preference the family member shown in the results:
Since we report results in patent families, we need to nominate a preferred patents family. By default this is the earliest granted US family member, if there is a granted US family member.
Some clients, or some projects, might benefit from preferring other family members, so we provide other options, as shown below:
The list of current options for preferences includes US, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Europe, France, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and WO patents. And if you are subscriber and would like a country not on this list, please let us know and we will add your country.
13) You can choose between priority date and publication dates for date filters
Priority date searching can be helpful for patentability searching, while publication date searching can be helpful for invalidation searching. But the good thing is that you have a choice about which date filter you use:
14) You can search before or after date nominated dates
This gives you more flexibility in your search strategies
And if you want to search between exact dates? You can also do that with the filter on the date column in the results:
15) You can keep a record of the patents that you like
And then keep a separate tab of these patents.
16) You can share an interactive link of results - or download all results in Excel form
The Excel download gives you a lot of flexibility to reuse the results, while the interactive form can be saved for future use, or shared with anyone, whether an Ambercite subscriber or not (click on the image for an example of this link).
17) You can hide unwanted patent families from the results
You might, for example, be using Ambercite in conjunction with other search tools, and have a list of results that you have previously reviewed but don’t wish to see again. In this case you can add these patents into the hide box, as shown below. Our algorithms will still consider those patents in the analysis but you can safely put them to the side and not think about them again. This feature was inspired by demand from Bayer Germany:
You can cut and paste into the box (maximum of 400 families), or import these one by one while reviewing the results, via the hide button shown (in the Patent Review Panel):
18) You can look up further details in Google Patent or Espacenet
While we show the title and abstract, sometimes you want to see the full patent specifications. We have provided a couple of options for you to do so.
If you choose to look up the patent via the Google patent link, any keyword highlighting you have set up in Ambercite is carried across to the Google lookup page. This can make it easier to review these patents:
19) You can search for companies with high ‘Licensing Potential’ from a group of patents
Do you want a prediction for who the patent owners might be able to license their patents to?
Ambercite provides Licensing Potential values to help rank potential licensees.
We have published a number of blogs showing how this data can be used in practice, for example in relation to a USD1.9 billion judgement against Cisco.
20) All of this is available via an API, as well as our browser based search engine
Do you want to incorporate Ambercite data directly into your in-house databases or search processes? Ambercite has an API allowing you to do this.
What benefits do these 20 features provide?
Features are great, I hear you say, but what benefits do I get out of this?
Clients use Ambercite to strengthen their existing searching processes in a variety of ways, including for patentability, novelty, infringement, examination and commercialization searching.
Of note, independent Canadian patent searching specialists Riahi Patents Inc recently published a study showing how combining Ambercite with existing search processes could improve search outcomes by up to 46% - with an average improvement (over 10 different searches) of 25%.
This is partially shown in the image below. It shows how for ten separate patent searches (search A to J), combining Ambercite with a conventional search led to improvements in their final patent search score in every case.
For a full explanation of how they they determined this, check out the blog found here.
So, in summary - an improvement in search outcomes of up to 25%.
Do you want to test these features and benefits for yourself?
Ambercite offers free trials, but to get the most of this, please contact us for a demonstration. You can try either option via the links below: