WIPO added China’s national patent collection to the searchable PATENTSCOPE database, pushing the service past the 30 million record mark and increasing it to 34 national and regional patent collections, giving users an unrivalled geographical diversity of fully-searchable data.
With the addition of about 3 million documents from China, WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE now includes some 32.5 million records that users can search for information about new technologies, which are often disclosed for the first time as international patent applications.
PATENTSCOPE provides access to international Patent Cooperation Treaty applications in full text format on the day of publication. The information may be searched by entering keywords, names of applicants, international patent classification and many other search criteria in multiple languages.
“These documents will give users a fresh, important perspective on the workings of one of the world’s most-dynamic economies”, said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry.
PATENTSCOPE users now have access to English-language bibliographic data of Chinese patents and patent applications from 1985 through 1995 and from 1996 onwards the submissions include bibliographic data in English and Chinese, as well as descriptions and claims in Chinese. In 2011, Chinese residents filed 415,829 patent applications, the most of any country in the world for the second year running.
PATENTSCOPE allows users to build complex search queries, with unlimited number of keywords and sophisticated operators enabling the discovery of relevant and difficult-to-find prior art.
Complete documents may be printed or downloaded, free of charge, search results can be visualized through graphical analysis tools, and technology developments in specific areas can be tracked through RSS feeds.
The PATENTSCOPE’s search system is multilingual. State-of-the art language tools facilitate patent searches. More specifically, one tool uses synonyms to ensure more thorough searches. It then translates the synonyms, as well as the original query, into several languages. Another tool offers machine translation of the title and abstract of patent documents. In addition, machine translation tools available freely on the Internet have been integrated to allow users to read results and patent descriptions in a familiar language.
Source: WIPO
