PATENTSCOPE: Frequently Asked Questions

• Weekly PCT publications available on day of publication
• Free of charge
• All related, published PCT documents downloadable (not only applications)
• Many national and regional collections, including the IP5 of 50+ collections
• Unlimited full text search
• Embedded images shown in the full text
• Many search operators supported: NEAR, BEFORE, AND, OR and NOT
• Support of “stemming” means that words with common roots are recognized, e.g. electrical, electric, electricity in most of the supported languages
• Ability to sort results according to relevance or publication/application date
• Cross-lingual information retrieval
• Specialized machine translation tools available
• Result statistics and analysis available
• Chemical structure search (exact + sub-structure)
• WIPO account
• Authority files for published PCT applications
• Side-by-side view of the results

You can search in all the filing languages of the documents contained in PATENTSCOPE, such as Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Chinese, Danish, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, etc.

The search interface is available in 10 languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish).

Once you performed a search and opened a patent record, just click on the tab Drawings to view any drawings. You can also view your results by images by selecting in the View just above the result list: Image for images only; Simple +image for information such as IPC, application and inventor names and publication date, title and application number and All +image to see also the abstract on top of all the information in the Simple + image.

You can send your questions to patentscope@wipo.int or use our Forum available in the Help menu under Feedback & contact

It will allow you to download up to 10,000 results, save your preferred settings and queries; as well as to use the chemical structure search. Creating a WIPO account is free of charge.

For detailed instructions on how to use the PATENTSCOPE database, please refer to the PATENTSCOPE User’s Guide , the online tutorials, the free of charge webinars. You can indicate in your WIPO account that you would like to be notified about upcoming webinars.

As a first step, using the advanced search option (found in the drop-down menu “search”), you can insert and combine the most relevant keywords (separated by a space) in the search fields for the technology you are interested in, e.g. hybrid, car , etc. (you can also use inverted commas “” to find an exact phrase). A complementary means of searching existing patents is to use the International Patent Classification (IPC), according to which patents have are divided into specific technical groups. All you need to do is enter a keyword to try the IPC search.

Whilst our online searches are helpful, we would always advise you to seek further information from your national patent or intellectual property office or from an intellectual property professional. Consult our list of intellectual property offices.

Also, please keep in mind that patent applications are generally not filed for a complete commercial product. Final products usually incorporate many separate innovations by different inventors. Indeed, the product may even contain technologies for which no patent application has ever been filed.

The default search field in the Advanced Search interface is EN_ALL. It is recommended to enter a field when using the Advanced Search interface either by typing the full name of the field of interest and PATENTSCOPE will transform it into a field code or by consulting the field code list.

Yes, enter this query in the Advanced Search Interface: CTR:WO AND DP:2016 ANDNOT PI:[* TO *].

There is a limit of 10,000 results when you are logged-in using your WIPO account.

Up to 25 results can be analyzed. By default, the top 10 applicants, IPC codes etc. will be shown but this number can be increased up to 25 in the Options menu.

No this functionality is not available. You can do a print screen and then save it as html.