Table 3 Final keywords used to scrape the Google Patents database for patents related to our focal taxa
Taxa | Keywords | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Bear | 'bear bile’, ‘bear farm’, bear ‘gall bladder’, bear ‘gall powder’, bear gallbladder, ‘fel ursi’, ‘ursodeoxycholic’, ‘ursus arctos’, ‘ursus thibetanus’, ‘xiongdan’, ‘熊胆’ NOT ‘ma huang jia zhu tang’ | Our keywords focussed on bear bile as the key product in trade because general keywords, such as ‘bear’ resulted in a lot of false positives. Ma huang jia zhu tang was sometimes mistranslated as ‘bear grass’. |
Caterpillar fungus | ‘cordyceps’, ‘caterpillar fungus’, ‘aweto’, ‘dongchongxiacao’, ‘dong chong xia cao’ | Other names for Cordyceps (e.g., Yarsagumba) did not uniquely match any patents. |
Horseshoe Crab | 'horseshoe crab’, polyphemus, ‘tachypleus tridentatus’, ‘tachypleus gigas’, ‘carcinoscorpius rotundicauda’, limulus NOT ‘soft-shell’ | Some patents for soft-shell crabs were mistranslated as ‘soft-shell horseshoe crab’ |
Pangolin | ‘pangolin’, ‘squama manis’, ‘jia zhu’, ‘pao shan jia’, ‘chuan shan jia’, ‘squama manitis’, ‘穿山甲’, ‘醋山甲’ NOT ‘drosophila’ | Pangolin is the common name of a fruit fly gene and occurs frequently in Drosophila genetic research. |
Rhinoceros | ‘rhinoceros’, ‘rhino’, ‘diceros’, ‘ceratotherium’, ‘dicerorhinus’ NOT ‘rhinoceros beetle’, ‘oryctes’, ‘polyporus rhinoceros’, ‘giraffe rhinoceros’, ‘game’, ‘toy’, ‘software’ | Oryctes rhinoceros and other rhinoceros beetles are a common agricultural pest. Many patents for rhinoceros were games or toys with rhinoceros characters. |
Sturgeon | ‘sturgeon’, ‘acipenser’ | Other sturgeon genera names (e.g., Huso) were not found independently in the patents data, and inclusion led to high rates of translation errors. |
