Patent Resources & Intellectual Property

How About These Apples?

The links below were collected to serve as a starting point for your intellectual property/prior art search. If you have any questions about patent searching, e-mail research-lib@wpi.edu. We'll do our best to help you. We cannot, however, offer any legal advice or run patent searches for you. Check USPTO patent attorney search for those that work with the USPTO.

Basics of Patent Searching

How About These Apples: Patent Searching Basics (PPT) for beginners to get a general understanding of the types of patents and how to search for them.

For upcoming library workshops, check our General Training Sessions schedule.

Free Patent Databases

U.S. Patent Full Text and Images Database: Includes Patent Images from 1790 to the most recent entry. Learn to use classification searches for more precision. A free TIFF viewer needed to display images, or use one of the PDF converter sites:

AlternaTIFF viewer plugin
Pat2Pdf converter

esp@cenet (European Patent Office): Includes patents & information worldwide back to 1970 with some countries providing full images of their patents in PDF format.
Patent Scope: Searching international patent application collections hosted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) 1978+. See also their listing of Patent Databases in Different Countries
Patent Information on the Internet: From the European Patent Office, an extensive list of patent offices and resources throughout the world.
Freepatents Online: Free registration required. Useful to search both granted patents and applications as well as European at the same time. Also, patents are easily viewed in PDF format and classification codes are hyperlinked for users to easily jump to other similar patents.
Google Patents: easy to search, for U.S. patents, PDF format
PatentLens: Search patents worldwide, powerful search options, PDF format

Subscriptions Databases and Electronic Resources at WPI

SciFinder Scholar - Chemical Abstracts Service 1907 - Present: for searching chemical and chemical engineering literature including patents.
EBSCOhost Business Source Premier: Provides full text for nearly 3,300 scholarly business journals, including full text for more than 1000 peer-reviewed business publications and articles on patents, intellectual property, legal aspects, etc.
LEXIS®-NEXIS® Academic: Provides a wide range of full text news, legal, and business information. Also includes full text patents (Choose Legal, then on right Patents) to search a combined file (back to 1790) of the utility, plant and design patents, including reissue patents, reexamination certificates, statutory invention registrations and defensive publications.

Patent Searching Tutorials and Worksheets

We have many print and electronic books on patents search, check our library catalog for titles such as Patent searching : Tools & Techniques.

Seven-Step Strategy for Finding Patent Information: From the USPTO.
Patent & Trademark Search Tutorials: Designed to give users a quick overview of intellectual property information available on the Web. From the University of Texas at Austin Engineering Library. Including handy Patent Search Worksheet
ESP@CENET Assistant: Must do for anyone serious about learning how to perform patent searches.
Schreyer Business Library's Patent Search Tutorial: helps to understand the process and procedure in searching for patents.
Internet Patent Searching Tutorial: From the UC San Diego Libraries site, teaches you how to search for patents by topic and number.
Searching for a U.S. Patent on the Internet. From the University of Maine Fogler Library.

Patent Trends and Statistics

Patent Fun

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Last modified: Nov 19, 2008, 16:57 EST