Sites to search
There are many free online search tools - these are just a sampling:
- USPTO: US Patent & Trademark Office
- esp@cenet: European Patent Office
- freepatentsonline
- Google Patent Search (beta)
- see also: biotechnology/chemistry patent search tools
| USPTO | esp@cenet | FreePatentsOnline | Google Patent | |
| Free/stable | Free, run by USPTO | Free, run by European Patent Office | Free, but registration required to look at PDFs and other services; advertisements |
Free, but in beta; features are often in flux; information in this table is as of August 2008. For the most up-to-date information, see: About Google Patent Search - inventor and assignee field searching currrently not working reliably (August 2008) |
| US coverage | 1790-current; pre-1976 can only search by patent# and class code | 1920-current; can search by title and inventor name back to 1920 | 1836-current; many pre-1976 are now indexed | Generally complete, although new patents are added sporatically; can search by title and inventor name back to 1790, although some patents are not fully indexed |
|
Foreign coverage |
None |
Over
70 countries worldwide;
date varies, but 1920- for most European countries Usually includes English title and abstract |
EPO (Europe+) 1981-; WIPO 1978-; Japanese 1976- | None |
| Search interface | Awkward - must follow complex syntax; but help is helpful | Fair; must search by patent numbers according to their syntax, not as cited: "US5971091" | Excellent; includes proximity searching, word weighting, word stemming and presents results by relevancy ranking | Excellent, but result sets limited to 600 patents (large searches do not return as many results as on the USPTO site) |
| PDFs | No; requires TIFF viewer for images | Yes | Yes, but registration required to view | Yes |
| Applications | Yes, in separate database | Yes | Yes | Yes - as of February 2008! |
| RSS/email alerts | No | No | Yes | Yes - as of summer 2008! |
| Other | • Patent
application status • Assignee changes • Sequence searching available |
Registration required for advanced features such as saving searches, email alerts, viewing PDFs, etc. | Numerous errors have been found due to OCR scanning |
Biotechnology/chemistry patent search tools
Biotechnology/Chemistry
Patents
- BIOS Patent Lens: search engine for biotechnology patents, with links to PDFs
- BIOSIS [MIT only]: general literature search, limit to document type "patents"
- SciFinder [MIT only]: search by research topic or chemical structure; can limit to patents and company name
Aggregate analysis of patents
The NBER
Data site has U.S. patent data files.
Description
Loading content... please wait
 |
Loading content... please wait