There are two types of source material: Patents and non-patent literature.
Patents
We position ourselves in the Public Search Room at the U.S. Patent Office. This once had major advantages because it put the searcher in close proximity to the examining corp. where consulting examiners for search direction was a tool. However, time rolls on and consulting examiners for search direction is no longer a tool. A more recent advantage is cost free use of the EAST system the same database used by examiners. However, likewise, there are now several commercial databases with features making them superior to the government provided system.
High quality commercial databases have several advantageous features making them superior to free sources:
- Complete foreign coverage, absolutely necessary for a comprehensive search;
- Patent Family organization including citation histories, e.g. family based forward/reverse queries
- Machine Translations;
- Combinable Classifications, IPC/CPC/US/Japanese F-terms.
One thing we know factually is that patent information source material is the same common material available to all search providers regardless of the database used. The database providers get their patent data from the same sources and there are only a limited number of commands.
Top level search engines are equivalent in quality. At Reveal-IP we use Questel-Orbit.
There is a second significant advantage to working out of the patent search room.
Non-patent literature
Scientific and Technical literature is a disorderly mess with no central repository. Each publisher maintains their own database and all of them erect a paywall. All the NPL sources, individually or combined, are essentially limited to large libraries, universities, and government agencies. No search firm provided can pay for all this.
We have free public access to all NPL databases subscribed to by the Scientific and Technical Library at the PTO.
Living in the DC metro area enables us to also go to the Library of Congress which we do. Further, we’ve researched at the libraries of the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Regulatory Commission, and the Federal Environmental Protection Agency among others.
Be assured that when the search objective requires NPL data we have broad free access a substantial volume.