Patent and Trademark Resource Center: Patent Databases

The worldwide database enables you to search for information about published patent applications and grants from over 92 different countries and regions.

The USPTO's new patent research database. There are many new features, like unlimited characters, complex Boolean and truncation searches, and the ability to search both applications and grants at the same time, Patent Public Search (PPS) replaces PatFT and AppFT. Future enhancements are planned, including the addition of foreign patent documents.

These two patent search databases will be available for a short time. They were replaced by the new search database Patent Public Search.

Provides status of a patent grant or published application and the prosecution history

Contains all patent family applications filed at participating IP Offices, along with the dossier, classification, and citation data for these applications. This service also provides Office Action Indicators to help users identify applications that contain office actions, a Collections View for saving documents and applications for review later on in the session, and the ability to download the documents in an application.

It includes over 73 million patent documents: PCT and national/regional collections, AI-based developed-in translation tool, chemical structure search and CLIR that finds synonyms search terms and translates everything into 13 languages, granting access to documents published in languages that the user doesn’t know.

Dunbar Library is also a Patent & Trademark Resource Center. Ran Raider is the government documents coordinator--you can set up an appointment and Ran can teach you how to search for patents. He created the Miami Valley Inventors database as well; there are 1800+ patent documents and 4000 individual names, some with historical notes.

Google Patents uses optical character recognition (OCR) to extract textual information from historical patent documents, pre-1971. The extraction process isn’t perfect, however, and inaccurate textual recognition is possible, especially for historic documents that are poor quality. If you find a document difficult to read, machines will experience even more challenges reading the text.

Patent Lens is a free patent search system developed by CAMBIA. The impetus behind Patent Lens is a desire to educate people about what patents are and how they can be used. CAMBIA has made several changes to Patent Lens over the last 2-3 years and now has a simple patent search system that has data access to the major patent data contributors such as the USPTO, the EPO, and WIPO. Notably, Patent Lens has full text data from Australia.

Provides patent analytics including patent mapping to relevant patent prior art. Pro version provides additional patent mapping features. US grants and applications only.

Developed as a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab, Cisco, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), this open-access repository archives prior art in a variety of formats, including Word documents, web pages, Excel spreadsheets, images, and videos.