World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
PATENTSCOPE is a free patent database made available by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) with coverage of over 60 patent collections. It is the primary and thus most up-to-date and complete source of data on patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and includes numerous unique features including cross-lingual semantic search, facilitating keyword search in multiple languages.
Synonyms and variants of keywords across multiple languages can be generated for search terms through the "Cross Lingual Expansion" interface or using the "Expand with related terms" function in the "Advanced Search" interface in PATENTSCOPE. The "Cross Lingual Expansion" interface includes a "Supervised" expansion mode, in which the technical domain(s) of the search terms, variants (and their closeness to the original search terms), fields to be searched, and distance between generated terms can be defined. Cross-lingual semantic search in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish were supported as of June 2020.
Logged-in users can access chemical structure search tools in PATENTSCOPE through the "Chemical Compounds Search" interface. Markush search available free-of-charge
Markush search available since September 2021. Chemical compounds can be entered into PATENTSCOPE according to their name, International Non-Proprietary Name (INN), International Chemical Identifier (InChI), Simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) notation, and chemical structure. Chemical structures can be uploaded as MOL files or image files or drawn using a chemical structure editor, which supports stereochemistry. Chemical compound terms are converted into InChI and searched in several collections, including the PCT, European, Japanese, and US patent collections (as of June 2020). Chemical compound terms can be expanded as substructures by selecting the "Search scaffold" option.
PATENTSCOPE allows patent documents to be retrieved based on both International Patent Classification (IPC) and Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).
Table, pie/bar chart, timeline
Both PCT and Paris routes families available in PATENTSCOPE
Search results can be sorted in PATENTSCOPE by publication date, filing date, or relevance (according to the weighted frequency of keywords in the search query). Keywords are highlighted in the title and abstract displayed in the results list. Titles and abstracts can be machine translated in the results list, and description and claims can additionally be translated in the record view. Machine translation can be done using several translation engines, including WIPO Translate, a machine translation engine using secure connections to WIPO and a neural network artificial intelligence technology based on a patent corpus to generate more accurate translation results for patent documents.
Search results can be analyzed in PATENTSCOPE both statistically and graphically by clicking the Analysis icon located next to the results number in the results list view. Search results are grouped in the "Filters" and "Charts" analysis by top (most frequent) patent collection, applicant, inventor, IPC class, publication year, and filing year, with the top 10 results being shown by default. Search results can also be analyzed as "Timeseries", with the count of results by patent collection, applicant, inventor, or IPC class by year being displayed. The fields analyzed, number of top entries, and graph style (bar or pie chart) can be customized in the "Settings" menu.
Search results can be monitored in PATENTSCOPE by establishing an RSS feed from a search results list. The RSS feed is automatically updated with any new results that meet the criteria of the search query and can be set up to send email alerts using an RSS feed reader.
Logged-in users can download up to 100 results from PATENTSCOPE with detailed information (including abstracts and representative drawings) or up to 10,000 results with limited information (including bibliographic data only) in Microsoft Excel format. The download function can be accessed through the results list.
Open access content of Nature
Filtered scientific and technical Wikipedia articles
PATENTSCOPE allows the use of Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, and XOR to combine terms in a search query. Terms can also be included or excluded from search results using the plus sign (+) or minus sign (-) in front of a term in a search query. PATENTSCOPE further supports an ordered proximity operator (BEFORE) and unordered proximity operator (NEAR), which limit the distance between terms combined with these operators to five or less terms in the results by default. The distance between terms can be customized by adding a number after the proximity operator (e.g. NEAR10 would limit the distance between terms to 10 or less terms in the results). Terms can be truncated using the asterisk (*), representing between zero and an unlimited number of characters, or a question mark (?), representing exactly one character. These wildcard operators can be placed at the end of terms (right truncation) or within terms (center truncation). PATENTSCOPE also includes an automatic stemming function, which identifies common word stems in terms in a search query and truncates these automatically.