Patents
A patent is a title that recognises – for an individual or a company – the authorship of an invention and the right to exploit it exclusively for a period of time, generally 20 years, thereby preventing others from manufacturing, selling or using it without the holder’s consent. * In return, the technical information contained in the patent is made available to the public for general knowledge, constituting a fundamental source of information in all fields of technology.
+info: OEPM. Patents as a source of technological information (download .pdf)
US Engineering Library. Monitoring and Intelligence Guide: * Patents
Subscription resources containing patents:
An integrated chemical information system containing databases produced by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and Medline. It allows users to search for various types of documents: journals, patents, conference proceedings, theses, etc. It also covers substances and reactions. 1907–. Publisher: American Chemical Society. ** From April 2023, CAS Content Collection™ has been expanded to cover patents from 109 issuing authorities, an increase of 45 global sources.
Go to SciFinder
A multidisciplinary database produced by Elsevier. It includes over 94 million records covering various types of publications (peer-reviewed journal articles – around 25,000 titles –, conference proceedings – over 11.5 million – and books – over 300,000 – from 5,500 publishers. *** It also provides access to over 46 million patents from five patent offices (US Patent & Trademark Office – USPTO; European Patent Office – EPO; Japan Patent Office – JPO; World Intellectual Property Organization – WIPO; UK Intellectual Property Office – UK IPO).
Access to the full text of articles from journals subscribed to by the University Library, as indicated in the records by the icon and link: "View at Publisher". It also allows you to obtain citation indices and other scientific evaluation indicators. [Updated: 2023]
Go to Scopus
Free resources:
Database of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, containing information from 1869 to the present day.
Go to http://www.cipo.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cipointernet-internetopic.nsf/eng/home
The European Patent Office (EPO) database, which offers free access to around 150 million patent documents from around the world dating back to 1782. * This is the ideal database for searching for information on the state of the art.
* Espacenet – pocket guide / * Video: How to use the new Espacenet (2:20)
* Traditional advanced search interface. Spanish
Go to Espacenet
A tool for searching for patents from Latin America and Spain within the Espacenet database. It contains around 2.5 million bibliographic records and over a million document images. The database is constantly expanding.
Go to Latipat / Espacenet
Access to the full text of millions of US and selected European (EP) patents via a powerful search engine.
Go to Free Patents Online, FPO
Developed by WIPO, it allows users to search for information on trademarks, appellations of origin, official emblems, etc., across a wide range of national and international sources. It contains over 14 million records.
A free service launched by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) that provides machine translations of patent documents from the People’s Republic of China. The coverage includes documents from published applications, granted patents and utility models from 1985 to 2012. It provides the original document image and its machine translation.
Google Patents provides access to around 120 million patent records from 115 national patent offices (JP, CN, US, EP, WO, DE, GB, KR, FR, CA, ES, RU, NL, FI, DK, LU, BE...), but does not guarantee complete coverage. Over 5 million are available in full text. It offers results dating back to 1790. * Full-text documents from 2001 onwards. Google Patents also retrieves technical documents and books indexed in Google Scholar and Google Books.
Go to Google Patents
Database of patents and utility models from the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM). 2 databases: INTERPAT: Bibliographic data and documents relating to patents and utility models dating from 1929, with records of royal privileges dating from 1826. Over one and a half million full-text documents. It also contains European patents and patents applied for via the PCT that designate Spain and generate a document in Spanish. It includes images published in the BOPI since 1988, as well as full-text documents. LATIPAT: Contains patents and utility models from eighteen Latin American countries since 1955, as well as images from 1991 onwards and full-text documents from various countries.
The website of the OEPM, a public body under the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, which is responsible for protecting various forms of industrial property. It provides news and a wealth of information on patents, utility models, industrial designs, trade marks and trade names: procedures, fees, forms, etc., as well as online services. It provides access to various databases: INVENES, Espacenet, Latipat-Espacenet, PATENTSCOPE
Basic questions on patents and utility models / Information handbook for patent applicants / BOPI (Official Industrial Property Bulletin) / Your guide to IP in Horizon 2020 / IPC: International Patent Classification
It allows you to search over 102 million patent documents, including some 4.3 million published PCT international patent applications. For detailed information on the available data, click here. Managed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)
Go to PATENSCOPE
The USPTO Patent Application Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT) is the database of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It contains patents dating back to 1790 (bibliographic data) and full-text versions from 1976 onwards.
Go to USPTO.gov