Patents and patent information

What are patents?

A patent is a legal document which gives it's owner the right to stop others from copying, manufacturing, selling, and importing their invention without their permission. Patents therefore protect the features and processes that make things work. Patents can be a vital source of technical information.

Heriot-Watt University Library does not hold many patents. Those few that we have can be found via the Catalogue. However, our Inter-Library Loans service can obtain copies of most patents where the full text is not available from the services listed below.

Finding patents

Various services can be used for finding patents:

GB Esp@cenet covers all GB applications published by the Intellectual Property Office under the Patents Act 1977, plus GB patents granted by the Intellectual Property Office since June 2002. The GB database is one of a number of databases available through esp@cenet through which patents from Europe and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), and information about patents worldwide, are available.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) produces the Patent Full-Text and Full- Page Image Database. Coverage is from 1790 onwards for issued US Patents, full-text from 1976 onwards. Google Patents also searches information from the USPTO.
Patent Lens is a worldwide, open-access, free full-text patent informatics resource.
Other search services include Patents.com, Boliven Patent Search, FreePatentsOnline search service, WikiPatents, TechXtra Patents and Standards Search, and Scirus Advanced Search which includes a filter for patent searching.
Patent Pal makes available a toolbar containing over 30 unique patent related searches and other features. You can download this toolbar to your browser.

Further information on patents

More information about patents is available from the Intellectual Property Office. The British Library's Help for Researchers: Patents site is also a good source of information about patents. The European Patent Office has guides to patents. PatentScope is the WIPO guide to using patent information. Other sources of information about patents include Intellogist, which is hosted by Landon IP, a global leader in professional patent searching.

The World Patent Report: A Statistical Review is produced by WIPO.

The Intellectual Property Office publish IP Insight, a free monthly e-newsletter. World Patent Information is a journal about Industrial Property information and documentation.

Some books about patents are available in the Library, for example: How to find information: patents on the internet, by David Newton, and Intellectual property: patents, copyright, trade marks and allied rights, by William Cornish and David Llewelyn.

The Patent Librarian's Notebook is a blog by Michael White, a librarian from Ontario, and The Patent Search Blog is published by Steve van Dulken, from the British Library..