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Search Fields

The information contained in patents can be split up into many fields (types of information), such as the name of the applicant or the date of publication. By making use of these pre-defined fields, you can accurately retrieve the patents you are looking:

Publication Number:

... if you know the number of a document ...

If you know the number of a particular document which you wish to look at (for example a patent reference you found in a journal or article, simply enter the publication number of the document (including the two letters corresponding to the country of publication) in the Publication Number field. Note that you must be searching in data from the appropriate country (category 1), or be performing a search in worldwide data (category 2) to retrieve the document.

Equivalent Documents:

... if you want to find equivalent documents ...

If you have found a patent of interest in one country, and wish to know if there is an equivalent (related) publication in another country, use the priority number from the first document to search in the Priority Number field of data from other countries.

Applicant or Inventor:

... if you know the name of an applicant or an inventor ...

If you are interested in checking if a particular person has patented any inventions, or are interested in seeing what application a particular company has filed, you should use the Inventor or Applicant fields.
The Inventor field contains the names of the inventors. In many cases the Applicant field contains the name of the company for which they work.
Note that a combination of more than one inventor (Inventor field) will generally result in a very precise search. In contrast, the name of a multinational corporation (Applicant field) will often give a large number of results.

Technical terms:

... if you know some specific words (technical terms) ...

If you simply want to find some documents relating to a particular technical subject, such as humane mouse traps, and you do not know of a particular document, or the name of a specific inventor or applicant, simply enter the terms describing the subject in the Title field. If you want to have more accurate results, you can use multiple terms, which will limit the number of results.

Recent publications:

... if you want to see what has been published lately ...

If you want to browse through the titles of all the documents published on a particular date for a particular country, (irrespective of technical field), then enter the desired year, month and day combination in the Publication Date field. Note that only entering a particular date can lead to a large number of results, if no further search criteria are specified in other fields.

IPC:

... if you have knowledge of the IPC classification system ...

The IPC classification is a hierarchical classification system routinely applied to published patent documents. If you know how to use the IPC classification, you can easily retrieve documents concerning a particular technical domain by entering the IPC class, sub-class and group symbols in the IPC Classification field.

Combinations:

... if you know more than one of the above ...

rice AND noodle

in the Title field and

Toh

in the Inventor field, you will very likely retrieve the concerning patent documents, when available. By using a combination, you avoid the long list of results you would have obtained by only entering

rice AND noodle

in the Title field, or only

Toh

in the Inventor field.

Extended Search Options

National Publications

Other National Publications

EP Publications

WO Publications

Worldwide publications

Japanese Publications

Coverage

Publication Number

Application Number

Priority Number

Applicant

Inventor

Publication Date

IPC Classification

Title