What is a patent?
A patent is a contract between the government and an inventor/s by which a legal right to the invention is granted in return for disclosing all details of the invention. For researchers, patents are an important source of scientific and technical information. Patents are often the earliest source of information on a new technology.
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Patent searching: tools & techniques
Publication date: 2007This book details a range of approaches to patent searching.
Patent databases
To determine if a patent exists you may wish to search the following free and UQ Library subscribed databases to discover prior art in an area:
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Espacenet (free)Espacenet is Europe's network of patent databases. It provides access to the fulltext of patents dating back to 1836. Using Espacenet it is possible to search a worldwide database of published patents from over 80 countries and regions.
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Google Patents (free)Patents from the United States or the European patent offices.
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The Lens including Pat-Seq (free)International patents in full-text. Sub-sections of The Lens include Pat-Cite to find articles that cite patents and Pat-Seq for studying DNA sequences in patents.
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Prior Art Finder (free)Allows for the discovery of documents related to a particular patent application or grant.
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USPTO (free)United States Patent and Trademark Office
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USPTO Web patent database (free)Provides access to US patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office back to 1790. Full text searching is available for US patents after 1975 and for earlier patents – patent number and classification searching is available.
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Derwent innovations indexThis database merges patent information from Derwent World Patents Index with patent citation information from the Derwent Patents Citation Index. It is possible to further search through non-patent citation links to ISI's Web of Science. Includes access to the Derwent chemistry resource of chemical structure searching and the Thomson patent store.
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CAS SciFinder-nIndexes chemistry journals and 16 million scientific patents from more than 60 countries, showing where compounds and engineering terms are located in the documents (PatentPak). Search patents by normal or Markush structure and also by reaction. Note: Before using SciFinder for the first time you must REGISTER in order to create a personal user name and password using the instructions in the link.
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DimensionsDimensions is a large citation and abstract database which integrates patents with a global grants database as well as clinical trials etc. Patents are sourced from the IFI Claims database. There are approximately 100 million records from 90 countries. 53 million records are in full text.
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ReaxysPatents are being added to the Reaxys chemical database within 5 days of release, enabling searches of new chemicals or drug development by using genes, proteins or substances as keywords.
Reuse this guide
This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence, except where otherwise noted.