Patents at MIT

Where to Search

Utility and Design Patents
Biotechnology/Chemistry Patents
Aggregate Analysis of Patents

Utility and Design Patents

USPTO: US Patent & Trademark Office
esp@cenet: European Patent Office
freepatentsonline
Google Patent Search (beta)

	USPTO	esp@cenet	FreePatentsOnline	Google Patent
Free/stable	Free, run by USPTO	Free, run by European Patent Office	Free, but registration required to look at PDFs and other services; advertisements	Free, but in beta
US coverage	1790-current; pre-1976 can only search by patent# and class code	1920-current; can search by title and inventor name back to 1920	1836-current; most pre-1976 can only be searched by patent#	Generally complete, although new patents are added sporatically (currently nothing past August 2007); can search by title and inventor name back to 1790, although some patents are not fully indexed
Foreign coverage Other foreign patent sources	None	Over 70 countries worldwide; date varies, but 1920- for most European countries Coverage details Usually includes English title and abstract Other foreign patent sources	EPO (Europe+) 2002-; Japanese 1996-	None
Search interface	Awkward - must follow complex syntax; but help is helpful	Fair; must search by patent numbers according to their syntax, not as cited: "US5971091"	Excellent; includes proximity searching, word weighting, word stemming and presents results by relevancy ranking	Excellent, but result sets seem to be limited to under 600 patents (large searches do not return as many results as on the USPTO site)
PDFs	No; requires TIFF viewer for images	Yes	Yes, but registration required to view	Yes - as of May 2007!
Applications	Yes, in separate database	Yes	Yes	Yes - as of February 2008!
RSS/email alerts	No	No	Yes	No
Other	• Patent application status • Assignee changes • Sequence searching available		Registration required for advanced features such as saving searches, email alerts, viewing PDFs, etc.	Errors have been found due to OCR scanning

Google Patent Search in beta: Since the Google Patent Search is in beta, its features are in flux; information in this table is as of February 2008. For the most up-to-date information, see: http://www.google.com/googlepatents/about.html.

Other foreign patent sources: For countries not covered by esp@cenet, see the Directory of Intellectual Property Offices from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Biotechnology/Chemistry Patents

BIOS Patent Lens: search engine for biotechnology patents, with links to PDFs
BIOSIS: general literature search, limit to document type "patents" [MIT only]
NCBI Entrez: search protein or genome literature, use "patent" as keyword
SciFinder Scholar: search by research topic or chemical structure; can limit to patents and company name [MIT only]

Aggregate analysis of patents

The NBER Data site has U.S. patent data files.

This page was last updated on 02/26/08