December  15th,   2011

Rolled-up IPC Core Codes have now been removed from IPC reclassifications (IPCR field) in patent databases on STN to deliver more consistent and streamlined IPC content.

In 2006, the European Patent Office (EPO) introduced Rolled-up Core Codes for each advanced level IPC code in patents. This practice simplified searching across countries by providing a code that spanned assigned IPC codes at both the Advanced level and the Core level. In late 2010, the EPO stopped rolling up Core Codes and removed Rolled-Up Core Codes from the IPC reclassifications supplied quarterly to database producers and vendors.

Rolled-up IPC Core Codes have now been removed from the IPCR fields of the following databases on STN:

CA^SM/CAplus^SM family of databases
EPFULL
FRFULL
GBFULL
INPADOCDB/INPAFAMDB
PATDPAFULL
PCTFULL
USPATFUL/USPAT2/USPATOLD
WPINDEX/WPIDS/WPIX

In the DWPI databases, the rolled-up core codes have been removed from the set of current IPCs only.