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Abstract
The abstract, which is preceded by the title
of the invention, contains a concise summary of the disclosure of the invention as contained in the description
, claims
and drawings
.
An abstract may be a translation into English of the abstract of a published document not originally in English.
Although not all documents have an English abstract, you may be able to retrieve a document using keywords, as the document you are looking for may have a corresponding document (an equivalent member of the family) with an abstract in the database. English-language abstracts are available for all patent specifications from the PCT minimum documentation (except for some of the more recent ones, which are still being processed) and their corresponding documents
dating from 1970 onwards, and in some cases even earlier than that.
Corresponding documents are chosen in the order shown below:
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If available, the EP document in English is taken
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If available, the US document is taken
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If available, the GB document is taken
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In February 2005, esp@cenet® held data on 50 million patents from 71 countries. A total of 16.6 million of these patents have an abstract in English.
Abstracts are loaded approximately one month after the publication date
.
For a detailed, regularly updated list of the specifications for which abstracts are available, click here
.
You can search for one word only (eg bicycle) or up to a maximum of four.
If you enter more than one word (eg frame bicycle), only those documents will be retrieved in which all the words appear.
You do not need to type the Boolean operator AND to combine your search words as it is the default operator in this field.
You can of course use the NOT operator to exclude certain words or the OR operator to add synonyms to your search query.
You can also search for a phrase using quotation marks (eg "bicycle frame"). This will retrieve only those documents in which the exact phrase is present.
Apostrophes, slashes and hyphens cannot be used in search fields. Please use blanks (spaces) instead.
Optimum results can be obtained by searching using a combination of the IPC
/ECLA
and abstract fields.
Note: In the case of some documents neither the title nor the abstract have been translated into English by the EPO. For these documents, searches can be conducted using classification symbols .
For more information on patent searching, see the following pages:
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