Few words re Russian patent prior art search issues
Russian patent prior art search seems to be in demand lately – if in the past we received roughly 1 order annually, then this year we’ve been occupied with it continuosly, there is even a small queue for next search.
We’ve finished another Russian patent prior art search project back in mid-June, and I feel like saying couple of words about it.
The order was placed with us by a large US IP company, and the only concern they had was about project turnaround.
Usually it takes us about 2 weeks per IPC subclass. We cannot speed it up.
(Updated on April 3rd, 2009: we can do it much faster now – currently full search is completed within a week)
Indeed, it’s quite lengthy.
That’s why our client asked:
Are your searches done manually or do you use a search engine against databases? Why will take almost 2 months ?
In contrast, a typical search of the US and EU patent literature takes about 7 days at the longest.
And our answer was:
Pre-1994 Russian patents are not available for keyword research –
while RUPTO database does contain these pre-1994 documents, they are
just TIFFs, images of scanned documents, so good deal of prior art
search is manual process, hence the lengthy delivery time.
To leverage the lengthy delivery time, first we search in documents which are available
online and after that do the search in pre-1994 patents manually, and we I’ll be sending
interim results as we uncover relevant patents.
If we are unable to find relevant references, we provide an interim summary report describing search strategy and the queries used.
Read more about Russian patent prior art search service at our site.
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