(Geneva, 12 April 2013) The addition, this month, of over ten million documents from the national patent collection of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), dating from 1790 to the present day, has expanded WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE to over 28 million searchable patent documents. The PATENTSCOPE search service is a valuable technical resource that provides access to information about new technologies which are often disclosed for the first time as international patent applications.
“PATENTSCOPE provides a comprehensive and systematic historical record of humanity’s technology, as well as insight into the latest technological developments,” said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry. He said that “WIPO is committed to further enhancement and expansion of the PATENTSCOPE database with the planned addition of several more national patent collections in 2013.”
PATENTSCOPE provides access to PCT international applications in full text format on the day of publication, as well as to 30 national and regional patent collections. The information may be searched by entering keywords, names of applicants, international patent classification and many other search criteria in multiple languages. User-friendly functionality greatly enhances access to the wealth of information available in the database. Complete documents may be printed or downloaded, free of charge, search results can be visualized through graphical analysis tools, and technology developments in specific areas can be tracked through RSS feeds.
The PATENTSCOPE’s search system is multilingual. State-of-the art language tools facilitate patent searches. More specifically, one tool uses synonyms to ensure more thorough searches. It then translates the synonyms, as well as the original query, into several languages. Another tool offers machine translation of the title and abstract of patent documents. In addition, machine translation tools available freely on the internet have been integrated to allow users to read results and patent descriptions in a familiar language.
