According to the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) of the World Intellectual Property Organization and its detailed rules for implementation, the retrieval and examination of PCT international patent applications need a certain number of patent documents and non-patent documents, that is, PCT minimum document requirements. The necessary patent documents refer to the patent documents officially published by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Russia (including the former Soviet Union), the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Patent Cooperation Treaty Organization since 1920; The necessary non-patent documents are adjusted irregularly, and the list of documents published by the International Bureau is generally more than 100 scientific and technological journals of the above seven countries and two organizations.
With the development of information technology, more and more information sources are used in patent examination, and electronic literature databases in various scientific and technological fields have been used more and more.
Answers to supplementary questions:
For publication, China adopts the standard of absolute novelty, that is, before the filing date of China's application for a patent for invention or utility model (the priority date if there is a priority requirement), the same technology disclosed in any language at home and abroad belongs to the existing technology that undermines the novelty of China's application, which makes China's application unable to obtain a patent authorization due to lack of novelty. Therefore, the China Patent Examination Association will search the relevant literature at home and abroad. China is a member of PCT, and the acquisition of patent documents and non-patent documents should meet the minimum requirements of PCT in principle.
But in fact, according to personal understanding, because the minimum amount of PCT documents, especially non-patent documents, is not included in many large authoritative literature databases, it is often impossible to retrieve them completely in the review process. For example, in chemical examination, in addition to searching domestic and foreign patent literature databases, examiners will also search American chemical abstracts CA, STN, some drug databases and periodical databases through computers, and so on. The number of non-patent documents covered by this search scope may be more than the number specified in PCT Minimum Number of Non-patent Documents, but it may not completely include every non-patent document specified by PCT.