The cost structure of sensemaking
INTERCHI '93 Proceedings of the INTERCHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems
Strategy hubs: next-generation domain portals with search procedures
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Information seeking and sharing in design teams
GROUP '03 Proceedings of the 2003 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
Clustering versus faceted categories for information exploration
Communications of the ACM - Supporting exploratory search
Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)
Cluster-based patent retrieval
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Intelligent patent recommendation system for innovative design collaboration
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Despite the large number of patent searches conducted by professional patent searchers and inventors, little is known about how such searches are actually performed. Here we describe a qualitative study of experienced patent searchers as they conducted in-context searches at a technology transfer office. Based on studies of expert search and sensemaking in other domains, we expected the professional searchers to (1) use well-formed search strategies that were effective for patent search, and (2) rapidly make sense of the novelty of an invention by constructing new representations to organize existing patents that appear relevant. Instead, we observed the searchers perform simplistic preliminary searches and then exchange their search process and results with inventors and patent lawyers to collaboratively make sense of the patentability and licensability of the invention. Furthermore, their sensemaking consisted of selecting known representations of patents to organize the new information, an approach we call "weak" sensemaking. These results suggest implications for designing systems that support the observed collaborative "weak" sensemaking with the goal of helping the users to more effectively determine the patentability and licensability of an invention.