PATENT SEARCHING

SEARCH THE PATENT LITERATURE at http://www.uspto.gov/ for United States patents, and http://ep.espacenet.com/ to search European, Japanese, and Worldwide Patents. Use the World Intellectual Property Organization (http://www.wipo.org) PATENTSCOPE interface at http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/ to search international patent applications. UNL Engineering Library is a United States Patent And Trademark Depository Library and the Engineering Librarian (Virginia Baldwin) can provide patent searching assistance. The UNL Engineering Library also has access to West - the search interface used by USPTO patent examiners.

Among reasons to do patent searching are the following:
(1) To find information about an area that is a candidate for a utility (based on usefulness) patent. Often there is an early insight into groundbreaking accomplishments in an area that are not published elsewhere.
(2) You have an idea and you want to see if there is a patent out there that is related to your idea. You will want to do a "prior art" search (search for granted patents in the same area). This search can only be considered a complete search if you are searching for all patents in the class(es)/subclass(es) related to your idea.The United States Patent and Trademark Office Web site <http://www.uspto.gov/> only provides keyword searching for patents back to 1976. Google Patents provides an OCR word search of some earlier U.S. patents and easily retrieves patent images.

Keyword searching may be appropriate as a method for locating information (1, above) and may assist the searcher in finding a class/subclass to search.