ME 386W- Engineering Design: The Methods

A patent is a legal document giving the patent owner certain exclusive rights to their invention for a limited time. Patents are an excellent source of information on new technology, trends in technological development, and specific products or innovations. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States. Like standards, patents may be difficult to read and find because of their specific vocabulary - in the case of patents, it's a legal vocabulary that can also be highly technical.

Find out more about patents in the Information Literacy Basics for CEIAS Students tutorial.

• Google Patents

  Google Patents covers the entire collection of granted patents and published patent applications from the USPTO, EPO, and WIPO. US patent documents date back to 1790, EPO and WIPO to 1978. Google features the full text of pre-1976 USPTO patents, but be aware that this text was generated with an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program and may contain errors.
• Derwent Innovations Index

  Database of patents and article citations relevant to chemical, electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering.
• USPTO

  The United States Patent and Trademark Office provides full-text information on patents issued from 1976 to present and images of all patents issued from 1790 to present.

  The USPTO Classification Listing may be especially helpful for locating patents.
• EPO - Espacenet

  The European Patent Office's (EPO) Espacenet offers access to more than 80 million patent documents worldwide, containing information about inventions and technical developments from 1836 to today.
• WIPO - PATENTSCOPE

  The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) allows you to search millions of patent documents worldwide.
• IBM Intellectual Property Database

This video from the Purdue Northwest Library will walk you through the basics of searching for patents in Google Patents.