During last year I’d been trying to collect document delivery requests data into a Excel file, and while I had some spare time during the holidays I analyzed collected data and revealed interesting facts I’m going to publish:

Total number of document delivery requests: 103
Requests for Russian articles: 34
Requests for non-Russian articles: 69 (that’s TWICE as much as compared with Russian articles, hmm…)
Average number of requests for document delivery: 9 per month
(BUT in December only we received 27 requests)

Top 3 foreign (that is non-Russian) articles requests:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech

Full list of foreign (that is non-Russian) articles delivery requests we fulfilled in 2009:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech
5 Croatia
4 Greece
3 Bulgaria
3 Serbia
3 Turkey
2 Slovakia
2 Ukraine
1 Armenia
1 Azerbajzhan
1 Belarus
1 Georgia
1 Germany
1 Hungary
1 Italia
1 Lithuania
1 Slovenia
1 Uzbekistan

Quite often we have to deal with insufficient data in citations. Here is few examples I’d like to share with you:

1. My patron wrote:
“I can’t locate the publication name so I am unable to determine the publication location. Is this something that you may be able to obtain?”
The publication in question was “Byul. Izobret. i Tovarnykh Znakov”. For me it was immediately clear that it’s in fact Official Gazette of the Russian patent office (“Byulleten’ Izobretenii i Tovarnykh Znakov” in full). So apparently it was a patent my patron was after – but it’s number was not available. Luckily, I knew year and title – so I could search the document in Russian patent database and locate few patents matching the criteria, and one of them was the necessary one.

2. My patron requested an article from journal titled “Chirurgia (Bucuresti)“. There were given all usual details – author, title, year, journal’s issue, pages – and previously I successfully delivered few articles from this very journal, so I went to check the necessary issue of the journal. But to my surprise, there was no such article published in this issue. I proceeded with search throughout entire archive of the journal – to no avail, such an article (and I tried concatenated title as well) was not found. I tried then to look it up by author – same result, search brought no matches. Hmm…so I had to do a bibliography search of my own, and it turned out that the citation was incorrect – the journal was not Romanian one (Chirurgia (Bucuresti), but instead it was an Italian journal with similar name:

CHIRURGIA
A Journal on Surgery
P.ISSN 0394-9508

Having found the correct citation, I was able to deliver requested article.

3. My patron asked to obtain a copy of an article published in a Russian newspaper. Data was sufficient – date, title, newspaper’s name, etc. – and even online archive of that Russian newspaper was available for search at the newspaper’s site. Strangely, requested article could not be found by search in the archive …In the end, I was able to retrieve full text of the article from a cache elsewhere – apparently, requested article was for some reason deleted from the newspaper’s archive – but once published on the Net information does not disappear tracelessly , so we, infopros, can sometimes resurrect wiped bits of data

I love this kind of document detective work, so feel free to contact us with any – regular or mysterious – document delivery requests, be that for Russian literature or non-Russian documents, we’ll give it our best try.

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Source: Russian patents blog

Related posts:

• New “trademark registration in Russia” and “Document delivery service” pages

“If I may ask you, what is you service about? Do you have
access to scientific information other than patents? for the past 10
years we are involved in catechin and other biflavonoids research and
discovered that many studies have been conducted in Russia / USSR.”

Actually, I was under impression what scope of our services is rather simple yet in detail explained at Patents from RU site – but apparently there is much to improve.

I took some time to summarize a description of our services in regard of scientific information researches we’ve been involved in lately – comprehensive search in Russian patent and non-patent literature has been our main occupation.

First off, here is a summary of search related services we carry out:

1) Russian patent documents delivery (for documents dated back to 1924).

We charge $29.50 per documents which are available in databases, and $50 for documents (like applications) which need to be ordered from archives.

Databases include Russian patents, Russian utility models and Russian industrial designs.

2) Russian patent database research

This service relates to cases when only a partial information is available.
We charge per hour, $60/hour.
Results will include document numbers and abstracts (if possible, in English).

3) Prior art search in patent databases of Russia and former USSR republics.

We charge $295 per subclass of IPC (there might be 1 to 5 subclasses) for searching Russian patents going back to 1924, and flat fee of $295 per search for searching fSU databases (back to 1993).

Normally, patent search is completed within a week.

Regarding English-language summary of the relevancy of found documents – the cost quoted does not include translation. English language abstracts are normally (but not 100%) available for post 1991 Russian patents – but older documents never had an English language abstracts.

We’ll do our best though to provide a short summary of each found
reference.

4) Russian Non-patent literature search (including bibliography research, Russian Internet queries, manual search in libraries).

We charge $60/hour, minimum 15 hours.
We’ll be providing intermediary reports as which literature was searched and what was found, so client will maintain control over expenses and time frame.

It’s hardly possible to provide time frame estimate – a 1-1.5 months would be more/less safe bet.

5) Document delivery service for references cited in bibliography research.

We charge $50 per references (up to 50 pages).
As a rule, we’ve been able to obtain Russian journal articles within a week.
Success rate is about 95%.

We’re able to obtain non-Russian references as well (especially from Eastern Europe countries), but success rate is considerably lower – although we do have a patron who keeps turning to us as his last resort once he’s unable to track non-Russian articles and oftentimes we’ve been able to deliver.

6) Russian to English translation service

We charge $0.12/word (English). All translations are being proof-edited by our partner in USA whose mother tongue is American English. His specializations are: pharmaceuticals, chemistry, biotechnology, agrochemicals, medical, and polymers.

His background includes:
- Two Years chemical research at CB Research & Development and Beard Research Inc., Senior Research Chemist
- Eleven years chemical research at DuPont, Senior Research Chemist
- Six years academic teaching and research at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn
· Collaborations with researchers in Germany, Soviet Union and Japan

Further on, here is an example of latest comprehensive search in biochem field. This is just an outline of the job done, but upon inquiry I can provide copies of actual search reports.

Results of the search were submitted to client in following order:

search-report-patents.doc
report-internet.pdf
report-articles.pdf
report-articles-2.pdf
report-articles-2a.pdf
report-foreign journals.pdf

Project scope:

1) Prior art search in Russian patent literature, at $295 per IPC subclass, total two subclasses searched (A61K 31/ and C07C 233/); results delivered as PDF files.
2) Prior art search in other Russian language databases – namely
former USSR countries patent databases and EAPATIS (Eurasian patents), at $295 per search
3) Prior art search in Russian non-patent literature, at $60/hour, total 18 hours spent

Charge for the project was: US$1965.00

There were neither translation nor document delivery services involved in this case.

–
Source: Russian patents blog

Related posts:

• Latest news on Russian patent search, translation and document detective joys
• Russian patents in English – cheaper than usual?
• Feb 15th: portfolio of Russian patent translations updated
• First-To-File vs First-to-Invent explained, quite nicely
• Translating Chemistry: Poor translation is costly

While success rate is quite high, sometimes we come across a tough case. Such a case I’d like to describe briefly in the post to give you an idea of how much it could differ from computerized oh so easy access to references in the West.

Our patron wrote:

Here is a Russian deposited document, can you help?

Condensation of indole 2-aldehydes with nitroalkanes in liquid ammonia.
Balabushevich, A. G.; Yares’ko, N. S.; Suvorov, N. N.
VINITI 216-76
1976

The inquiry came on Jan.22. Prior to turning to our assistance the patron tried to obtain this document himself but failed.

The same day I email my inquiry to VINITI (it took some time to find an email contact…). No response whatsoever.

On Jan. 25th (Friday) I repeated the inquiry to another email address, and called Moscow. Gradually, matter of search began to clear up – the reference in question should be a manuscript deposited with VINITI back in 1976. Such an old manuscripts are not stored in Moscow, they are kept in a storage somewhere in Moscow region.

My inquiry was accepted for processing on Friday and they told me to call back next Tuesday by evening time – on Tuesdays a regular delivery from the storage is scheduled. In case the document will be found by that time they promised to tell me in what condition it is at the moment – cause manuscript might be in any kind of condition, and the condition would define whether it’d be possible to scan the manuscript or not (“We’ve began offering a scanning service recently” – how’s that for year 2008?!), otherwise it’d be xeroxed and hard copy mailed by regular post.

If on Tuesday there will be no document available, I was instructed to call on Thursday after lunch – there will be another scheduled delivery which occurs twice a week.

If everything right, I’d have to pay for the service by bank transfer (that means another 3 day – at best! – delay). Upon receiving the funds they’d send either electronic copy or hard copy by regular post.

Stars were kind to me, and on Tuesday the manuscript was found.
My polite request to provide an electronic copy caused quite a stir – they told me they’d make an exception for me. All their resources were assigned to achieve the goal – to produce an electronic copy of the manuscript.
As it turned out, resulting files greatly overcome size limits allowed for email correspondence – few kilobytes.

Their access to email is uneasy thing, too – incoming emails are being checked once a day (at best!) or at longer periods, cause computer resources might be assigned to the scanning job.

So, telephone still (as of 2008) remains to be the main tool of communication with …National Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Russian Academy of Sciences I’d been trying to retrieve manuscript from.

My gratitudes go to the staff of manuscripts department of VINITI who did their absolutely best to help me to obtain the reference I was after – I must admit what my sarcasm is NOT targeted on these kind, attentive and responsive people.

See also: