Toolkit for SEAS Students: Handbooks, Properties, Patents and More: Patents (get ideas)
General Patent Information
Patents are a rich source of scientific and technical information. The time-consuming task of searching for patents has been streamlined by the availability of Web-based patent search and retrieval systems. Use the Patent Databases tab above to learn about the various databases available. Use the Patent Searching Tutorials tab to learn how to effectively and efficiently search for patents.
Important Note:
If you want to conduct a comprehensive search to determine if your idea is “‘patentable”, you need to search more than just patent literature. For example, you may also want to search international patents, patent applications, scholarly articles, standards, blog posts, public presentations - any public information.
Disclaimer:
UB library staff are not able to provide any legal advice. This guide is purely for helping you learn about and search for patents. If you need legal assistance, please consult a licensed attorney. See the UB Patent Resources & Other Tools tab for more information on resources available to current students, faculty and staff.
Getting Started
What is a Patent: the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
- Usually, a 20 year exclusive right to the patent within the country the patent was issued.
- The exclusive rights to exclude others from making, selling, or importing the invention.
- A patent is only valid in the country it was issued.
Three Types of Patents:
- Utility patents: granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof. Also known as 'patents for invention". Lasts 20 years and represents 90% of applications.
- Design patents: granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture. Only protects the appearance of an article, but not its structural or functional features. Lasts for 14 years.
- Plant patents: granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant. Lasts 20 years.
What is Patentable - Criteria:
- Novel - unique and new, never made public, before the date of the filed application
- Useful - identifiable benefit
- Non-obvious - to someone working within that field
Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office (2014 Oct). General information concerning patents. Retrieved from http://www.uspto.gov
Major Patent Databases
Five major databases are described below. The first four are freely available on the Internet. The Derwent database can be accessed only by UB patrons.
Special care should be used to determine the scope of each database. Country coverage, starting dates, and searchable fields often vary within the same database depending on the country and the time period.
- Espacenet Worldwide Patents This link opens in a new windowA database maintained by the European Patent Office (includes U.S. patents) with more than 100 million patents from over 80 countries. Espacenet also offers a comprehensive Patent Classification search option. For more detail on how to search for patents by patent classification, see the video on the following web page: https://research.lib.buffalo.edu/patents/classification-searching.
- Google PatentsGoogle Patents includes over 120 million patent publications from 100+ patent offices around the world including the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Deutsches Patent und Markenamt (DPMA), Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), and China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). Patents without English full text are machine-translated to English, so you can search foreign patent documents using only English keywords.
- Patent Lens This link opens in a new windowPatent Lens (The Lens) offers patent searching and analysis for millions of patent records from over 95 different jurisdictions. This free and open database provides a modern search interface and offers some unique patent searching tools, notably gene sequence searching.
- U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO)The United States Patent & Trademark Office offers free access to the full text of U.S. patents and patent applications through its website.
The USPTO Issued Patents Database contains the full text of U.S. patents issued from 1790 to the present. Patents from 1790-1975 can be searched by patent number, issue date, or classification code only. Patents from 1976 to the present can be searched by keyword as well as patent number, classification code, inventor's name, assignee's (company's) name, issue and application date, etc. The USPTO Patent Applications Database contains the full text of patent applications published since March 15, 2001.
- PATENTSCOPE This link opens in a new windowThis patent database maintained by WIPO covers more than 67 million patents from over 50 countries and patent offices including European (EP) and World (PCT) patents. See National Collections - Data Coverage for a listing of the countries and data fields searched.
Special features include free online translation of patent texts using Google Translate and an innovative cross-lingual search capability that automatically translates search terms into multiple languages and includes those terms in your query. PATENTSCOPE also includes excellent analysis and refining tools to narrow search results. Information from the results can be shown as tables, graphs, or pie charts. For example, a pie chart could be produced showing the number of patents from each country. - Derwent Innovations Index This link opens in a new windowDerwent Innovations Index provides in-depth indexing of patents from 40 issuing authorities for the years 2008 to the present. Nearly all scientific and technical areas are covered including chemistry, electrical technologies, electronics, engineering, and other applied technologies. The database can be used to discover the latest technological advances, monitor competitors' progress, formulate fresh ideas for research, or get an overview of inventions in the global marketplace.
Patents Searching
For tutorials on patents searching, please visit the Patents Guide.
Google Patent Search
U.S. Patent 3,005,282 Toy Building Brick
Engineering Librarian
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260
epautler@buffalo.edu