Databases for patents

Patent Search and Discovery Databases

A listing of the more commonly used Patent discovery search engines (freely available to all) follows below. All registered patents (and many patent applications) are open-access documents, freely available via Internet in the public domain.
Note there are numerous other proprietary, specialised patent search products on the market (sold as subscriptions). QUT does not subscribe to any of these. Nearly all QUT scholars and researchers will be able to satisfactorily discover the patents they need by using these freely available, search engines.

Patent Search Engines

AusPat by IP Australia (Australian Patents) In the AusPat database you can:
•Search for applications through the Quick, Structured and Advanced search interfaces
•Use the full text searching capability to explore the contents of applications back to 1904
•View, sort, customise and print the results of your search in the "Search Results" page
•Use the Name Selector to find variants of Applicant and Inventor names
•Access responses, reports, amendments and documents Open for Public Inspection(OPI) via eDossier
•Access additional opposition, ownership and publication data
•Use eJournal – search, browse and print information from the AU patent journals
•Use eRegister – search, browse and print extracts from the Register of Patents.
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Espacenet at the European Patent Office (EPO) Free access to the database of over 90 million patents documents from around the world.
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FreePatentsOnline.com. Able to do patent fulltext data searches, read relevant articles, get IP news and view popular patent topics.
Google Patents by Google Inc. You can search Google Patents (a subset of Google Scholar) for US, European, WIPO registered , Canadian & Chinese patents.

With Google Patents, you can search and read the full text of patent grants and applications from around the world. If you are looking for prior art, check the "Include non-patent literature" box to include results from Google Scholar.

More about the new Google Patents
J-PlatPat (Japan Platform for Patent Information) Filing a patent application and machine translated publications into English are also available from this J-PlatPat (Japan Platform for Patent Information) search engine database.
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The Lens: an open public resource for innovation cartography by Cambia The Lens serves nearly all of the patent documents in the world as open, annotatable digital public goods that are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data. It allows document collections, aggregations, and analyses to be shared, annotated, and embedded to forge open mapping of the world of knowledge-directed innovation.
Patent Fetcher This site has a free way to get complete U.S. Patent and published Patent Application PDF files after you have performed a patent search. They retrieve patent page images from national patent office web sites, like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, combine them into a single PDF file and cache the PDF files so that you can then perform a patent download.
PATENTSCOPE : search international and national patent collections by World Intellectual Property Organization Using PATENTSCOPE you can search 74 million patent documents including 3.5 million published international patent applications from most national patent offices.
United States Patent Search from the USPTO by The United States Patent and Trademark Office Patents may be searched in the USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT). The USPTO houses full text for patents issued from 1976 to the present and PDF images for all patents from 1790 to the present.

Databases for patents

Patent Search and Discovery Databases

Patent Search Engines

Global links and information

Acknowledgement of Traditional Owners