The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.
[previous article] [next article]Patents are a valuable part of the primary literature of engineering. 70-80% of the information contained in patents never appears anywhere else in technical literature. The Engineering Library has a collection of US patents and all the tools, paper and electronic, necessary to perform a patent search.
We are also seeing an increasing number of web sites that offer patent searching capabilities. These databases can usually be searched by inventor and assignee and by words in the title and abstract. A few sites allow classification searches. Searching by classification in a patent database is like searching by subject in the library's catalog. The Patent and Trademark Office assigns one or more of their 125,000+ classes and subclasses to each patent they grant. Since the title of the patent often obscures the technology, searching by class insures that you have covered all the patents in a particular area of technology.
According to the Community of Science, "Citation information speaks directly to the technological impact of the patent. Technologically significant patents tend to be cited more frequently than those that are of lesser impact. Information related to competitive R&D assessments, technology transfer and licensing and mergers and acquisitions can be garnered through data evaluation from this source." The sites mentioned in this article have cited patent searching capabilities.
United States Patent And Trademark Office
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/
This is the official US government patent site. Tools or applications present for establishing a field of search:
Plus...
Community Of Science US Patent Citation Database
http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infoor/COS/PATENTS.HTM
This site allows you to search all US patents from 1975 to the present. It is updated weekly and contains front page patent information: the inventor, assignee, title, US and international patent classes and fields of search, any articles and patents cited, the abstract and any patents that cite that patent.
IBM Patent Server
http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/
The IBM Patent Server contains bibliographic data and text of all claims of patents issued by the USPTO. Currently, the server contains the full text of US patents from 1974 to present, plus some patents issued during 1971. The patent images are in GIF format.
Care must be used in choosing this patent site. According to the IBM Patent Server FAQ, "The communications between IBM and the users of the IBM Patent Server site are not of a confidential nature. Therefore, any communications that you wish to remain confidential, whether they are search queries, guestbook entries, e-mail, or any other communications, should not be relayed to the Patent Server."
Other patent sites of interest include:
The European Patent Office
http://www.epo.co.at/index.htm
The Japanese Patent Office
http://patent-jp.com/JPS.htm
UT Austin Patent Search Tutorial
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/ENG/PTUT/ptut.html
American Institute Of Physics Online Journal Service
Comes To Purdue
The Purdue University Libraries have added seventeen AIP titles
to its list of e-journals available through THOR+.
To access these journals, point your browser to
http://thorplus.lib.purdue.edu/vlibrary/journals/
Applied Physics Letters Chaos JETP Letters Journal of Applied Physics Journal of Chemical Physics Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Journal of Mathematical Physics Journal of Optical Technology Low Temperature Physics Physics of Plasmas Physics of Fluids Physics of Particles and Nuclei Physics of the Solid State Review of Scientific Instruments Semiconductors Technical Physics Technical Physics Letters
In addition to these titles, you have access to AIP's SPIN database and other physics information resources. The Purdue University Libraries have recently signed on with JSTOR. This new resource will provide a core of scholarly journal literature of the 19th and 20th century. Journals to be covered in JSTOR include the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, the Mathematics of Computation and the Annals of Mathematics.
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