Resources by format

Here are listed guides for finding materials based on their formats.

Looking for more specific patent and trademark help? Hop on over to our full Patent and Trademark Guide that provides support for inventors, researchers, entrepreneurs and more!

This list of resources will enable you to retrieve most U.S. patents or trademarks, if you have a specific citation. However, if you have a product idea and want to determine if a similar item has been patented, searching these resources to determine patentability may be difficult. Patent and trademark searching can be very complex, and unless one has experience the results may not be valid.

United States, European, and Canadian patent sites

Derwent Innovations Index from Web of Science
Derwent Innovations Index indexes citations, abstracts, and full-text patents from 40 worldwide patent-issuing authorities. You can view concise abstracts written by subject experts, then link to full-text primary records of patents from a range of full patent sources. 1963-present
Derwent Innovations Index facilitates rapid, precise patent searching, letting you conduct patent and citation searches of inventions in chemical, electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. Derwent Innovations Index covers over 14.3 million basic inventions from 40 worldwide patent-issuing authorities. You can view concise abstracts written by subject experts, then link to full-text primary patent records from a range of full patent sources.

This resource merges the value-added patent information from Derwent World Patents Index with the patent citation information from Derwent Patent Citation Index. You can use additional descriptive information and coding to quickly grasp a patent's significance and its relationship to other patents. Reduce duplication of R&D; track competitors' activities; detect and avoid patent infringement; identify potential gaps in the marketplace and possible licensing opportunities.
Dimensions Plus
Dimensions Plus indexes more than 100 million publications, ranging from articles published in scholarly journals, books and book chapters, to preprints and conference proceedings. Dimensions Plus is an extensive and fully interlinked database with publications, grants, patents, clinical trials, datasets and policy documents. 1600s to present.
European Patent Office Espacenet
Search for information about published patent applications from over 80 different countries and regions (not just in Europe). Based on the PCT minimum documentation, which is defined by WIPO as the minimum requirement for patent collections used to search for prior-art documents for the purpose of assessing novelty and inventiveness.
Google Patents
Google Patents indexes the full text of U.S. patents available through the U.S. Patent Office. Use the Advanced Patents search page to search by criteria like patent number, inventor, and filing date. Full text available in PDF. 1790-present.
Lens.org
Searches patent and scholarly publication data, with over 100 million patent records across 95 jurisdictions world-wide, and over 200 million scholarly records from PubMed, Crossref, and more. Many filtering and search options with advanced boolean functions, structured searches, classification searches and more. Lens.org also includes options for searching biological sequences included in patents.
Patentscope
Search over 100 million patent documents from WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), which includes over 4 million published international patent applications. Create a free account to access additional features for searching chemical compounds and downloading larger search records.
USPTO Patent Public Search
Patent Public Search is USPTO’s new comprehensive patent and patent application search tool that replaces PatFT and AppFT. Patent Public Search covers all US patents and published patent applications from 1790 to the present. Users can customize the search interface, explore full patent documents and export results to a spreadsheet. **Note: Interface is designed for Chromium-based browsers and some functionality may be lost if using other browsers.

Other free patent resources online

University owned patents from Free Patents Online: Data for about 150 universities (mostly American) is available, including Virginia Tech. Clicking on a name of a university will retrieve a list of US patents and published applications assigned to that university.
National Inventors Hall of Fame: Listing of inventors with brief biographies.
Patent Information Users Group: This site contains links to many patent resources worldwide. The site is oriented towards the serious patent searcher, not the casual browser.
European Patent Office: The EPO allows a single patent application to be filed in one of the three official languages (English, French or German), giving patent protection in all 18 member states of the European Patent Organisation
Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, Inc.: Information about patents at Virginia Tech..
World Intellectual Property Organization: United Nations agency to oversee global intellectual property issues.

Trademark resources online

USPTO Trademarks
Search database for trademark registrations and applications by mark, owner, or serial/registration number with Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS)