Databases for Patent Searching

Patent Search and Discovery Databases

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

Patent Search Engines

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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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.
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.
FreePatentsOnline.com. Able to do patent fulltext data searches, read relevant articles, get IP news and view popular patent topics.
PATENTSCOPE by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Search international and national patent collections. Using PATENTSCOPE you can search 74 million patent documents including 3.5 million published international patent applications from most national patent offices.
Engineering Village by Elsevier Engineering Information Search US, European and WIPO patent sources (either separately or independently).
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.
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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AusPat (legacy "Pericles" Australian Patents search interface) by IP Australia 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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Australian Patent search (new interface) by IP Australia New search interface released in 2024

Databases for Patent Searching

Patent Search and Discovery Databases

Patent Search Engines

Global links and information

Acknowledgement of Traditional Owners