PCT (country) confusion.

[Andrea]

What does the country PCT indicate or stand for? I'm trying to find the number of patents that South Africa had published in any given year (the most recent I can search for is 2008) however, in the search results, in addition to South Africa in the country section, PCT comes up as well. I'm not sure if that may be skewing the results.

[Christophe]

Dear Andrea,

When you search the south african collection, the system returns you two kinds of records:
(1) South African national patents for which we have received bibliographic data from the office. These could be pure national applications or PCT applications having entered national phase in South Africa
(2) recent PCT records for which we have received an indication of entry in national phase from the South African office but for which we do not have yet received bibliographic data

There should therefore not be duplicates,

I hope this helps,

Christophe