Display patent number column?

jahooper

Is there a way to display patent numbers in a column along with title/creator(inventor) etc? It does not appear in the menu for column options and does not appear to be mapped to any of the available options. Thanks!

adamsmith

No, but that may be worth considering. It doesn't seem like it'd be more unusual to look/sort for the item Number (which would also include report and bill/legislation numbers as well as episode numbers) than for issue or call Number.

jahooper

Thanks, having column for patent number (and the other patent fields like application number, assignee, filing date, etc also) would probably be very helpful for anyone doing patent research. It is very common for multiple patents to have the same title (as they are in the same patent "family" which may have multiple US patents, and even international patents - all with the same title but slightly different claims) which makes it difficult to distinguish among them in the Zotero interface.

yaoadrian

Yes, this would be very helpful. In addition to the Patent Number, having displayable columns for Priority Date, Filing Date, Assignee, etc. would all be crucial for making Zotero useful for patent searching/organizing.

Is there a plan to implement this in the near term? I don't believe it to be too difficult of a modification.

Thanks!

adamsmith

I can't promise how quick it'd be, simply because there's lots to do, but I'm pretty sure that you're right and the change is fairly trivial to implement, yes.

jahooper

Thank you again for looking into the patent column additions.

As a minor side quibble, virtually every patent publishing authority uses the [CountryCode]+[PatentNumber]+[KindCode] (with no spaces) as their standard format, i.e. 'US7654321B2'. Zotero currently adds a space between the patent number and the kind code. This is something I end up having to manually edit frequently as I use Zotero to export CSV files of patent search results, then re-import them into other tools and reports.

Thanks again, so happy I found Zotero!

adamsmith

importing from where? Google patents or any other patent databases, too?

jahooper

Currently, to get patent refs into Zotero, I am only using google.com/patents as that's the only one that cites them as a patent (is this correct?). The issue I have is that, when I export from Zotero -> CSV, the added space creates a (minor) extra step when I invariably have to copy from a spreadsheet into any other database.
Espacenet, Thomson Innovation, Questel Orbit, TotalPatent, and most other tools that allow you to bulk-import patent numbers require, if there's a kind-code, there be no spaces. The only major authority that doesn't follow that rule is the USPTO which wants just the number with no country-code or kind-code.

For import, ideally it would be great to be able to use Espacenet.com, Orbit, or Thomson Innovation to import, as they have a more complete database of international patents plus all US patents. I'm happy to discuss in private getting you temporary access to TI and Orbit if this is something you want to look at in the future. Many patent professionals use these tools for their daily research and reporting.

adamsmith

I thougt we supported Espacenet (we used to at least) as well as USPTO.

jahooper

So to give you a full picture of my research process, I'll use TI, Orbit, or Espacenet to do the actual research, then I have a Chrome extension that lets me right-click a patent number from any of those sites and open a new Google Patents tab, then from there I cite it into Zotero.

I just thought of another possible solution (which would probably take a lot more work). The EPO has a RESTful patent data API that is open to the public (at least to some degree). I wonder if there's any way a future Zotero could simply parse the patent number out of the page URL and fetch the metadata from EPO in a separate request... Maybe an idea for a Zotero plugin.

http://www.epo.org/searching-for-patents/technical/espacenet/ops.html#tab1

jahooper

You're right about Espacenet and USPTO, not sure how I got confused. thanks

Rintze

I'd also be very happy to see a translator for https://www.lens.org/lens/. Their site was just redesigned at the start of this year. It doesn't look like they offer metadata on their pages, but there is BibTeX and RIS export. (see e.g. the cloud icon at https://www.lens.org/lens/search?n=10&q=&inventor=MUSK+ELON&l=en&st=true&p=0)

hpxing

yes the patent number is more meaningful than title

joycekwc

A similar issue I run into is sorting by report number, which I note is mentioned at the beginning of this thread. I use report a lot for all kinds of documents because of the fact it has a number field. At the moment I have to use a hack of modifying the documents in the order so I can use the Date modified field, so it would be great to have this included.