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Applicant
An applicant is a person or organisation (eg company, university, etc.) who/which has filed a patent application. There may be more than one applicant per application. The applicant may also be the inventor
, although this is not necessarily the case.
The applicant format for a person is made up of the surname followed by the first name(s) (eg Smith John).
You can search for one or more words (up to a maximum of four). If you enter more than one word, only those documents will be retrieved in which all the words appear (eg Smith John). You do not need to type AND as it is the default operator.
You can also search for a phrase using quotation marks (eg "Smith John"). This will retrieve only those documents in which the exact phrase is contained.
The applicant format for an organisation is made up of all the words comprising the name of that organisation (eg British Aerospace).
You can search for one word (eg Aerospace) or more (up to a maximum of four).
If you enter more than one word, only those documents will be retrieved in which all the words appear (eg British Aerospace). You do not need to type AND as it is the default operator.
You can also search for a phrase using quotation marks (eg "British Aerospace"). This will retrieve only those documents in which the exact phrase is present.
You can also use the OR operator to add synonyms or NOT to exclude some words from your search query.
Apostrophes, slashes and hyphens cannot be used in search fields. Please use blanks (spaces) instead.
Note: Applicant names are not completely standardised. Care should be taken with acronyms and abbreviations. If, for example, you wish to search for IBM patents, you should also try entering "International Business Machines". In order to retrieve all variants, you should also use truncation and alternative spellings.
The first name(s) of an applicant may often be abbreviated.
A patent may have been sold to another company. In the database, it is the name of the patent-holder at the date of filing which is registered, so it can be difficult to get accurate information about new patent-holders from patent databases.
Note: 33.6 million documents contain the name of the applicant(s). In the case of documents published in other alphabets (Cyrillic, Greek), the names of the applicant, inventor, etc., are not searchable. These documents may however be searched using the existing classification systems.
For more information on patent searching, see the following pages:
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