Library Guides: Chemical Engineering Research Guide: Patents

Information about Patents

How to Read a Patent
Breakdown of how patents are arranged from Patent Lens.
Basic Patent Information
General information about patents from USPTO.
Ten Things to Know About Patents
TIFF Image Viewers
Links to TIFF viewers which are required to view patent images (necessary for all pre-1976 patents).

Tutorials

Patent Search Tutorial and Information
Provides background information on patents as well as an interactive tutorial on how to search using the USPTO's website by codes and keywords. Created by the University of Texas at Austin.
Espacenet Tutorial
Learn to search Espacenet, the European Patent Office's database.

NexisUni Patent Search

The Patents search form is located by clicking 'Menu' on the top left-hand side of the page and selecting 'Patent'. On the Patents search form, you can perform such tasks as:

Find a patent by Patent Number
Find a patent by Inventor
Find a patent by Applicant Name or Applicant Number
Search European and Japanese Patents

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Access news, business, and legal sources. These include regional, national, and international newspapers, news wires, broadcast transcripts, non-English language news sources, magazines, trade journals, business publications, SEC filings, law reviews, statutory, administrative and case law.

Patent Searching Online

USPTO Patent Searching
Allows you to search the full-text of issued patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Images of the patents are only available as TIFF documents, and you may need to download a TIFF viewer to open the documents.

All patents issued in the United States (1790 - current) are searchable from the USPTO's website. There are several other databases that contain this information with different search engines and output features. You may want to explore searching with several of the interfaces to make your search comprehensive.

Patent Lens
Allows you to search granted patents and applications from the US, Europe, Australia, and WIPO. Full-text available as HTML and PDF.
Google Patents
Applies Google searching technology to the USPTO's database of patents. Patents are available as PDFs. **Note: Google used OCR technology to scan the documents from the USPTO's database and some mistakes are in the system. Check your results.
Espacenet
European Patent Office website. Search by patent number (with or without country code) in the Smart Search box.
Espacenet Advanced Search
Search Espacenet by subject using a keyword search in the "Title or abstract" box.