Patent Information and Databases

Here is the location of the Hall-Jaffe-Trajtenberg datasets at NBER: NBER Patents and Citations Database

An updating project is underway under the direction of Iain Cockburn, Boston University but this will not be complete until 2007 or 2008. Further information will be posted here as it becomes available. In particular, work is underway on a patent name-matching project which will standardize patent assignee names, and match them to the names of firms in the Compustat files. This work is based to some extent on work already done by researchers at the Institute of Fiscal Studies (London), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Universita Bocconi (Milano), but the algorithms have to be modified extensively for USPTO data.

New: a match of EPO (European Patent Office) patent data to European firm data (including R&D data) by Grid Thoma

Patent information at the UC Berkeley Libraries

News and information sites:

Yahoo! Government: Law: Intellectual Property: Patents

United States Patent and Trademark Office Home Page

Managing IP Newsletter

Patent blog of Dennis Crouch

Greg Aharonian's website

ipIQ home page

Research websites:

European software patent study website

TIIP Newsletter on Innovation and IP

Patent search and data sites:

USPTO Patent Database search

Full text search for patents from 1976. Patents from 1790 through 1975 are searchable only by Issue Date, Patent Number, and Current US Classification.

Google patent search beta

Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. “We don’t currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months, but we look forward to expanding our coverage in the future.” BHH note: some patents appear to be missing (e.g., 3930271, issued Jan 6 1976, the first one in the computerized data base).

Patent lens - free searchable online patent database including US, EPO and WO patents

The Patent Lens resource comprises a fully text-searchable patents database, containing over 5,500,000 patents and patent applications from the PCT, US, and EPO databases. They started with the life sciences collections from these jurisdictions and have recently added all patent classifications from the US applications and granted patents, and are in the process of expanding to all classifications in the EPO and PCT collections.

Patent Genius – free online patent search

US patents issued from 1976; interesting technology categories

Free online patent search

US Patents issued from 1976; US Applications from 2001; European Patents from 2000

esp@cenet – EPO

The European Patent Office’s search site, which includes applications and grants from the EPO, WIPO, and worldwide. Note that you should use worldwide search (not EP search) for patents with an application date older than 24 months

Patent family data at INNO-Tec, LMU

Data provided by Dietmar Harhoff, which allocates each application (identified via the appln_id variable) in the PATSTAT triadic patent data (version April 2007) to exactly one group of patents with the same set of Paris Convention priorities. In principle this can be used to construct a consistent set of citation data that takes account of variations across patents in the offices that they cite. There is also very useful documentation available on this website.

OECD Patent Data

Japanese Patent Office Data from IIP

The new IIP Patent database, produced under the supervision of Akira Goto and Kazuyuki Motohashi. Data on 9 million applications and 2.7 million registrations (grants) from the early 20^th century to January 2004. Includes citations and owner information.

Fee-based sites:

Lexis-Nexis (US patents from 1791)

INPADOC (Equivalents from EPO)

Delphion patent server home page

Derwent home page

Patent classification systems:

USPTO patent classification definitions

International patent classifications

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Last Updated 29 February 2008 by Bronwyn H. Hall