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“That Means Nothing To Me As A Normal Person Who Doesn't Know About Patents”: Usability Testing Of Google Patents And Patent Public Search With Undergraduate Engineering Students, Graham Sherriff, Molly Rogers
“That Means Nothing To Me As A Normal Person Who Doesn't Know About Patents”: Usability Testing Of Google Patents And Patent Public Search With Undergraduate Engineering Students, Graham Sherriff, Molly Rogers
Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association
Patent searching is an important research tool for undergraduate engineering students, yet it requires special topic knowledge to conduct successfully. Patent database websites have the ability to alleviate or add to the complexity of patent searching, depending on their usability. Prompted by the launch of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Public Search (PPS) website in early 2022, the authors investigated the usability of PPS and Google Patents. The study's objective was to gain insights into the ways in which the websites of commonly-used patent databases support undergraduate students’ patent searching activities. The study examined students’ performance of typical …
A Case Study Of The Complicated History Of Rice University’S First Patents, Hannah G. Edlund
A Case Study Of The Complicated History Of Rice University’S First Patents, Hannah G. Edlund
Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association
Digitization and online public databases have made patent searches a much simpler pursuit in recent years. However, uncovering a pre-digital era patent’s history and context remains challenging. A search for the first patents assigned to Rice University highlighted associated issues. Older patent formats often do not clearly indicate inventor-assignee relationships, and applications and official communications are not available online. To determine how Rice came to own three 1948 patents, extensive archival research was required. Were these patents assigned to the University by inventors, independent of its support or funding, or was their work performed at and for Rice, thus obliging …