Research Guides: Patent Searching Resources: Patent Searching Databases

Searching Patents and Patent Applications

Patent Inspiration
Patent Inspiration is a fast and powerful interactive database that helps with the navigation and exploration of 69 million patents. The database contains full text (claims and descriptions) of the main searched authorities (WO, EP, US, CA, etc.) and contains bibliographic data from over 90 countries. Interactive visualizations and text mining are just a few of the analysis tools available.

Current students, faculty, and staff must register and create personal accounts using University of Minnesota e-mail addresses to save reports, export all patents, make use of the briefcase and use the more advanced analyses tools. Please email eresolve@umn.edu with a subject line "Request for Patent Inspiration personal account" to start the process of account creation.

Google Patents
Allows for full-text searching of patent grants and applications from the United States and several other major jurisdictions.
USPTO
Use PatFT to search for U.S. patent grants, and AppFT to search for U.S. patent applications. Note that PatFT only allows for full-text searching back to 1976; to find patents granted before then, you must search by classification.
WIPO Patentscope
Searches through international patent applications along with patent documents from a large number of national patent offices.
Espacenet
Searches through patent documents filed with the European Patent Office, along with 81 other jurisdictions.
Derwent Innovations Index
Merges patent information from Derwent World Patents Index with the patent citation information from Derwent Patent Citation Index. Users can conduct patent and citation searches of inventions in chemical, electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering.

Westlaw
Westlaw allows users to access the Derwent World Patents Index, which features a proprietary classification scheme, translated foreign patent abstracts, and other editorial enhancements.
Lexis
Lexis Advance now includes TotalPatent, an advanced patent searching interface.
Bloomberg Law
Bloomberg hosts a searchable database of U.S. patents.

Espacenet Classification Search
A good resource for finding relevant classification codes in the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) scheme. Users can find relevant classes by browsing the classification tree or by keyword search.
Global Dossier
This database gives users online access to the file histories of patent applications from five major jurisdictions.
USPTO PAIR
PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval) contains patent prosecution documents filed in relation to U.S. patent applications
WIPO Pearl
You can use Pearl to look up how technical patent terms have been defined, and to find equivalent terms in other languages.