Lesson 21. Patent Information Databases
A patent is a form of intellectual property and a unique source of technical information. Thus, investigations of European Patent Office have revealed that from 70% to 90% of patent information is not published elsewhere.
Patent information is reflected in official bulletins and specialized databases. There are databases of different countries’ patent offices, of regional patent offices, international associations, and information centres.
Searching patent information is one of the stages of a patent research.
— classifications, including International Patent Classification classifying the content of patents in a uniform manner;
— keywords;
— title of a patent document;
— names of authors or inventors, data on patent holders;
— number of a patent, the date of application, etc.
Below follows overview of the resources for patent retrieval.
QUESTEL database on Orbit platform contains over 55 mln patents collection covering 95 countries and international patent offices (USPTO, WIPO, EPO, etc.). The database is accessed from UrFU corporate network.
Bibliographic information on patents is presented in various databases: Web of Science, INSPEC EBSCO publishing, REAXYS Elsevier, SciFinder Chemical Abstract Service, etc.
Database «Техэксперт Интранет» (in Russian) allows studying normative documents in UrFU network:
– State Standard for patent investigations (GOST Р 15.011–96. System of products development and launching into manufacture. Patent investigations. Procedure and scope);– Federal Law N 316-FZ, dated 30 Dec. 2008, «On patent attorneys» (with amendments dated 02 July.2013);
– The Civil code of the Russian Federation, Part 4 (patent law).
2. OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES
Users have free access to the resources of Federal Institute of Industrial Property (FIPS):
— INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM (see Figure 1) provides free access to certain full-text and abstract databases. It is better to start retrieval from the full-text DB Perspective Inventions (in Russian). There are also some other databases: INVENTIONS (Russian Patented Inventions (in Russian), Retrospective DB of Russian patent documents in a facsimile kind in Russian, Applications for inventions); UTILITY MODELS (Russian Utility Models (in Russian)); TRADEMARKS (DB of Russian Trademarks (in Russian), Applications for Russian Trademarks (in Russian), Appellation of Origin DB (in Russian), Well-known marks of Russia (in Russian)); IPC (International Patent Classification in Russian); INDUSTRIAL DESIGN (DB of Industrial Design (in Russian), International Classification of Industrial Design ( in Russian)); COMPUTER PROGRAMS, DATABASES, TOPOGRAPHIES OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS (Computer Programs (in Russian), Databases (in Russian), topographies of Integrated Circuits (in Russian)).
Figure 1. Screenshot of FIPS Information Retrieval System
— OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS of inventions, industrial designs, trademarks, and other results of intellectual activity. This section of the site allows looking through bulletins.
— OPEN REGISTERS (in Russian) display the status of a patent/license or the state of an application to Rospatent.
— PatScape.ru (in Russian) provides access to the repository of patent information including more than 120 mln documents (a new product of FIPS) (see figure 2).
Figure 2. Screenshot of PatScape.ru Database
— The Russian segment of Еspacenet online service and Espacenet properly comprises the sources of patent information from 90 patent offices.
In addition, FIPS contains an information block that considers the questions of legal status of intellectual property, offers Glossary and some tips on where to take out a patent and make paten search.
The English-language FIPS site has also the section INFORMATION PRODUCTS AND SERVICES containing Official Publications of Rospatent and Products of FIPS based on Official Information of Rospatent.
— PATENTSCOPE WIPO — database of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) containing more than 58 mln documents.
— Yandex and Google services: Yandex.Patents (see Figure 3), Google.Patents (including Russian-language version of Google.Patents).
In conclusion, it should be noted that patent information can be obtained in interdisciplinary resources containing many kinds of documents, for example, eLIBRARY and Dimensions.