19. FAQ

19.1. Generic

19.1.1. What are automatic keywords?

Automatic keywords are words automatically generated by language processing algorithms. They are calculated by processing the title, abstract and author keywords. They are used to enrich the information relating to a publication or patent and give an indication of the topic of the document.

19.1.2. Where is the data coming from?

The data in TIM comes from Semantic Scholar for scientific publications, from Patstat for patents, from the EU data portal for cordis publications. Other data are going to be made available soon from various sources, like US Patent Office, arXiv.

19.2. Search

19.2.1. My search returns over 10,000 documents. Why am I not allowed to run the search?

If your search returns more than 10,000 documents, the system will not allow it. This restriction is put there both for multiple reasons, the most important of which are:

1. The computations required for bigger searches are very heavy for the infrastructure and might result in slowing down the graphs for everyone.

2. The larger the graphs, the less readable they become. The purpose of graph navigation is to be able to quickly understand the landscape of a technology, and making big graphs makes this almost impossible.

19.2.2. The 20 document-preview is not enough to decide whether my query is appropriate. What should I do?

You can try to perform the same search query in the original source website (e.g. Semantic Scholar) and analyse the results as you see fit.

However, you need to take into account the fact that the search query language may not be the same, and that the dataset may also different.

Another option is to go ahead with the search and then analyse the full list of results in the document tab in TIM.

19.2.3. How can I access the publications or patents I discover using TIM?

For the publications, you can access the website of the publisher of the article via a direct link by clicking on the title of the article in TIM Technology or TIM Open Access. The free access to the full text of the article depends on the subscriptions your Institution has procured, in the case of TIM Technology. For Semantic Scholar included in TIM Open Access, most of the publications should be available, except a few exceptions that may be behing a paywall. For patents, you can access the free database of Espacenet. Use the patent number provided to find easily the document you are looking for. Also for publications, you can access them through a scientific publications repository, such as Scopus or Web of Science. Simply copy the title of the article and search it in the repository.

19.2.4. There is a strange spike in publications on my search query, but when I look at the documents they are mostly useles low-quality news documents. How can I get rid of them?

There is a specific journal type called a “trade journal”. You can explicitly remove them from your searches by adding an NOT emm_sourcetype:"d". For more possible values, see Fields in TIM.

19.2.5. I cannot find a specific publication. Why is that?

• The publication might be in a journal not included in the available collection. Similarly, if it’s a patent, it might not be included in Patstat.

• It might be a limitation of the database of TIM. For now, we only have original research articles from year 1996 onwards.

• If you searched by title, there might be a small difference between the original title and the title provided by the Source.

• If it’s a very recent publication, maybe TIM’s database is not yet up-to-date.