Subject Guides: Patents: Where to Search

Sites to Search

There are many different tools available for patent searching.

PatentSCOPE
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
Provides 37 million patents documents including 2.5 million published international patent applications.
Google Patents
FreePatentsOnline
USPTO - United States Patents and Trademark Office
USPTO - Patent Application Information Retrieval
USPTO - Patent Assignments Database
USPTO - Publication Site for Issued and Published Sequences (PSIPS)
Espacenet - European Patent Office
Offers over 90 million patents.
Interactive Patent Coverage Map
Links to the official patent authorities, associated regional patenting authorities as well as the patent collections of most countries.

SciFinder
Everyone MUST register on campus using an Iowa email account to use this resource. Detailed instructions are located at guides.lib.uiowa.edu/chem. SciFinder gives you instant access to the world's largest curated collection of information on disclosed chemistry and related research produced by CAS.
LexisNexis Academic (now called Nexis Uni)
- This link opens in a new window
LexisNexis Patents

The Lens
Its datasets include the European Patent Office's DocDB bibliographic data (1907-present) and Grants (1980-present), USPTO Applications (2001-present), Grants (1976-present) & Assignments, WIPO PCT Applications (1980-present) as well as Australian Patent full text.
Japan Platform for Patent Information
Formerly Japanese industrial Property Digital Library. Offers public access and machine-based Japanese-English translations
pat2padf
Offers U.S. issued patents in PDF format
Canadian Patents Database
Includes over 2 million patent documents with descriptions and images.

Classification Searching

International Patent Classification (IPC)
Provides for a system for the classification of patents and utility models and is used in most countries.
Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC)

Major Sites

Type	PatentSCOPE	FreePatentsOnline	Google Patents	USPTO	Espacenet
Free	Free Sponsored by the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)	Free Registration additional features (e.g., save searches, export data to Excel) no advertisements	Free Google search engine accessing the U.S. Patents & Trademark Office	Free Sponsored by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office	Free Sponsored by the European Patent Office
U.S. Coverage	1790 – current for bibliographic information 1863 – current for abstracts (not all are full-text searchable)	1836 - current only selected pre-1976 patents are full-text searchable	1790 - current comprehensive USPTO coverage	1790 - current pre-1976 can only search by patent # and class code	1836 - current abstract coverage from 1970
Foreign Coverage See also Directory of Intellectual Property Offices by Country	Coverage varies for 50+ patent offices Check for latest coverage	EPO (Europe+) 1981 - WIPO 1978 - Japanese 1976 -	87 Million Patent Publications from 17 Patent Offices	None	Coverage provided by EPO's full-text databases and is updated daily Check for latest coverage
Search Interface	Excellent 5 search types: Simple; Advanced (Boolean); Field Combination; Cross Lingual Expansion; Chemical Compounds full text 8 languages	Excellent proximity searching word weighting word stemming presents results by relevancy ranking	Excellent easy to search spelling auto-correction full-text search of U.S. patents from the Google Patents homepage Field search (e.g., patent number, inventor, filing date) using the Advanced Patents search page	Awkward complex syntax includes detailed Help menu	Good 3 search methods (Smart; Quick; Advanced; Number; Class) onscreen syntax & search tips English, French & German links to European country specific screens
PDFs	Yes Includes PDFs of applications and other select documents	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Applications	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes, in separate database	Yes
RSS/ Email Alerts	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Other	Translator function for 8 languages Full-text searching	Registration required for advanced features such as saving searches, email alerts, etc.	full-text searching able to view drawings separately view overview, citiations, references, claims, and drawings from the about page	Patent application status Assignee changes Sequence searching available	Translate text into 30+ languages with "patenttranslate" from EPO and Google

The University of Iowa Libraries

Lichtenberger Engineering Library

Patents

Engineering Librarian

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Sites to Search

Classification Searching

Major Sites