Annotating patents with Medline MeSH codes via citation mapping.

Both patents and Medline are important document collections for discovering new relationships between chemicals and biology, searching for prior art for patent applications and retrieving background knowledge for current research activities. Finding relevance to a topic within patents is often made difficult by poor categorization, badly written descriptions, and even intentional obfuscation. Unlike patents, the Medline corpus has Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) keywords manually added to their articles, giving a medically relevant taxonomy to the 18 million article abstracts. Our work attempts to accurately recognize the citations made in patents to Medline-indexed articles, linking them to their corresponding PubMed ID and exploiting the associated MeSH to enhance patent search by annotating the referencing patents with their Medline citations' MeSH codes. The techniques, system features, and benefits are explained.