The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) have been adding a range of useful tools for many aspects of intellectual property for a while now, including searching databases for patents, trademarks and designs; classifications; statistics; and multilingual terminology across patent documents. I’ve written before about where you might go to conduct a search, sticking mainly to free sources, but WIPO have just introduced a new tool called WIPO Inspire that is a collection of reports on patent databases and their features.
There are only 24 databases at present but I’m sure that list will grow as new entrants establish themselves in the market. It’s weighted slightly in favour of fee paying, or commercial, databases, and the free ones are currently restricted to the IP5 (the five largest intellectual property offices), but not either of PatFt or AppFT from the United States, but including WIPO’s own PatentScope, and a few others such as The Lens. If you need to look further afield, WIPO Inspire has incorporated the older Patent Register Portal page, so you can still locate the relevant national databases for jurisdictions outside the IP5.
The reports on each database are quite extensive, and go into detail regarding the jurisdictions covered, which patent classifications can be used, how their patent families are structured, and how you can manipulate your results through sorting, export or analysis features, plus a lot more.
While it is a short list of databases, and quickly scanned, it is also possible to filter the databases by their features. For example if you are looking for a database that allows semantic searching, to find those that do involves checking a box within the menu on the left hand side.
WIPO Inspire includes a comparison tool that sits up to four database selections side by side so the features of particular interest can be compared easily.
WIPO Inspire looks like a good tool to help if you are unfamiliar with patent databases, in terms of knowing what their names are, and what they can do. You may just find one that has the combination of features you’re after.