Innovation and Rights - Developing Biomedical Devices: Design, Innovation and Protection - page 47

Fig. 3.4 Example of statistical analysis with Patentscope ®
Classification helps in performing searches (prior art, novelty or patentability)
regardless of the used language, because in this way notions or ideas which are
sometimes hard to express through words can be searched for; another important
help of classification is the availability of abstracts (in English) or even patent
texts are not always available (very old patents are classified as images and hence
are not searchable through keywords).
Since a classification perfectly matches the inventive notion in no more than
10-20 % of cases, the use of keywords remains at any rate an essential search
method.
3.4.2.1 International Patent Classification
The International Patent Classification (IPC) is a system to classify and search for
patents and scientific articles [ 28 ].