Engineering Design Capstone

Patents CANNOT be searched by keyword alone. The U.S. and other countries have classification systems that categorize issued and pending patents into technology groups identified by a number, and these must be used in order to do a thorough search. Start with a keyword search in Google Patents to identify relevant patents, examine their classifications, and then search key classifications. Google Patents may be used on its own to identify just one or two relevant patents.
 

Steps to Starting a Preliminary U.S. Patent Search

• 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.