Online Patent Searching Techniques: An Overview

Abstract

During the year 2000, European Patent Office (Espacenet), United States Patent & Trademarks Office (USPTO), and Japanese Patent Office (JPO) began offering online patent search capabilities on their websites free of charge. Some other websites of organisations like World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO [PCT]), SIPO (Chinese), KIPO (Korean), orgainisations from Australia, and New Zealand also provide free search facility. This has resulted in patent information being readily available to people than ever before due to the revolution in information technology (IT). Researchers, who never previously considered using patent data to supplement the basic literature, might be surprised at the wealth of under utilized information now available at no cost. Free patent databases on the Internet are useful, particularly as they allow users in numerous locations to quickly access information. To search these sites searchers should be aware of the search techniques of boolean operations, truncation, and wildcards. What skills are required for online searching? This paper tries to provide online search techniques to the people who want to do a patent search on the internet free of cost.

http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.23.4.3603