Patent Research Resources

Our standard patent research coverage includes English-based patent and non-patent literature, as well as English abstracts of many foreign language patents and published applications.

You may opt to add foreign-language specialists to a project team to perform searches on foreign patent office databases and review the full text of non-English documents.

Patent Literature

Cardinal utilizes an extensive collection of up-to-date worldwide patent literature including issued patents, applications, utility models, and industrial designs. Each of our tools and databases vary in scope, coverage, and capability. Together, they provide our researchers with powerful and efficient access to references using full text, bibliographic, classification coding, design coding, English language, native/foreign language, and/or full-text machine translation coverage.

PATENT LITERATURE WORLDWIDE COVERAGE

Regions/Countries/Organizations

North America
Canada
Mexico
United States

Central & South America
Argentina
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cuba
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Nicaragua
Panama
Peru
Trinidad and Tobago
Uruguay

Western Europe
Belgium
Benelux
Cyprus
Denmark
East Germany
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Iceland
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Malta
Monaco
Morocco
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
San Marino
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom

Eastern Europe
Armenia
Austria
Belarus
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Czech Republic
Czechoslovakia
Estonia
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Moldova
Montenegro
Poland
Republic of Serbia
Romania
Russia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Soviet Union
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia (Serbia & Montenegro)

Middle East & Africa
Algeria
Egypt
Israel
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Malawi
Morocco
South Africa
Tunisia
Turkey
Zambia
Zimbabwe

Asia & Australia
Australia
China
Hong Kong
India
Indonesia
Japan
Kyrgyzstan
Malaysia
Mongolia
New Zealand
Philippines
Republic of Korea
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Thailand
Uzbekistan
Vietnam

Organizations
ARIPO
Eurasian Patent Office
European Patent Office
Gulf Coop. Council
OAPI
PCT
WIPO

Patent Literature Database Sources

Minesoft PatBase®

Coverage – 135+ million patent and related documents from over 105 countries, updated weekly
Worldwide representation including Europe, USA, Japan, China, Israel
Used by a range of IP professionals including corporate IP departments, patent attorneys, information specialists, patent analysts, licensing, technology transfer, R&D
Used for legal IP searches (freedom to operate, novelty and infringement searching), general technological and competitive intelligence searches, monitoring and analysis
PatentOrder for high-speed online patent ordering/delivery integrated with PatBase

Questel Designs

Designs is a database built by collecting registered design information from around the world
Updated within 24 hours of Designs Publication according to authority
Watching/alert/SDI functions as well as reports and exports
Advanced workflow features such as annotations and tags
One record per design rather than one record per application makes multi-design applications, both single and multiclass, easy to search for and review
Multilingual interface

INPADOC

Legal status data relates to information on the events during the lifetime of a patent application
Contains legal status records from over 50 international patent authorities
Records originate from the patent gazettes or registers of various national patent authorities, including the EPO and WIPO
EP data is generated both during the EPO patent granting procedure and in the post-grant phase
Weekly exchange file contains only the most recently loaded events and does not include file history
Downloadable weekly frontfiles and an annual backfile
Data retrievable in XML format
Consolidated backfile contains all the legal status events in the database in ascending sequence of country code / publication number and split into files country-by-country
Weekly extended legal events file (XLEV) which translates the weekly bibliographic file (publication, application and priority data elements contained in DOCDB) into legal events

Free Databases

Google Patents
USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT)
USPTO Patent Application Full-Text and Image Database (AppFT)
Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR)
Patent and Trademark Resource Centers (PTRCs)
Patent Official Gazette
Common Citation Document (CCD)
International Patent Offices Published Sequences
Patent Assignment Database (Assignments on the Web)
WIPO – Global Brands Database
WIPO – PatentScope
WIPO – Global Designs Database
Espacenet
org (Cambria, Queensland University of Technology)

Non-Patent Literature

NON-PATENT LITERATURE SOURCES
PAID ACCESS

Proquest-Dialog
ProQuest is committed to empowering researchers and librarians around the world. Its innovative information content and technologies increase the productivity of students, scholars, professionals and the libraries that serve them. Through partnerships with content holders, ProQuest preserves rich, vast and varied information – whether historical archives or today’s scientific breakthroughs – and packages it with digital technologies that enhance its discovery, sharing and management. For academic, corporate, government, school and public libraries, as well as professional researchers, ProQuest provides services that enable strategic acquisition, management and discovery of information collections.

Industry Areas

Aerospace & Defense
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
British Library Inside Conferences
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
Gale Group Computer Database™
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
Inspec®
Jane’s Defense & Aerospace News
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
ProQuest Technology Research Professional
Transport Research International Documentation
Weldasearch®

Automotive
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
British Library Inside Conferences
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
Inspec®
Jane’s Defense & Aerospace News
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
ProQuest Technology Research Professional
Transport Research International Documentation
UBM Computer Full Text
Weldasearch®

Chemistry
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
Analytical Abstracts
British Library Inside Conferences
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology Abstracts
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
HSELINE: Health and Safety
Material Safety Datasheets -OHS™
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS®)
Toxfile®

Diagnostics & Medical Devices
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
Allied & Complementary Medicine™
British Library Inside Conferences
British Nursing Index
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
ESPICOM Pharmaceutical & Medical Device News
FDAnews
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
MEDLINE
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research

Energy & Environment
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
Aquatic Science & Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA)
Bacteriology Abstracts (Microbiology B)
British Library Inside Conferences
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Ecology Abstracts
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
Gale Group Computer Database™
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
Health & Safety Science Abstracts
ICONDA – International Construction Database
Industrial and Applied Microbiology Abstracts (Microbiology A)
Inspec®
Oceanic Abstracts
Paperbase
ProQuest Environmental Science Professional
ProQuest Materials Research Professional
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS®)
Toxicology Abstracts
TOXLINE
Transport Research International Documentation
TULSA™ (Petroleum Abstracts)
Weldasearch®

Engineering & Technology
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
British Library Inside Conferences
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
Gale Group Computer Database™
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
ICONDA – International Construction Database
Inspec®
Jane’s Defense & Aerospace News
Paperbase
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
ProQuest Technology Research Professional
Transport Research International Documentation
TULSA™ (Petroleum Abstracts)
UBM Computer Full Text
Weldasearch®

Financial Services
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
ICONDA – International Construction Database
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
Transport Research International Documentation

Food & Agriculture
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
AGRICOLA
AGRIS
Aquatic Science & Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA)
Bacteriology Abstracts (Microbiology B)
British Library Inside Conferences
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Ecology Abstracts
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
FDAnews
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
Health & Safety Science Abstracts
ICONDA – International Construction Database
Industrial and Applied Microbiology Abstracts (Microbiology A)
MEDLINE®
Oceanic Abstracts
ProQuest Environmental Science Professional
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS®)
Toxicology Abstracts
TOXLINE

Healthcare
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
Allied & Complementary Medicine™
British Library Inside Conferences
British Nursing Index
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
COVID-19 Research
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
Gale Group Health Periodicals Database
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PharmaBiomed Business Journals
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
HSELINE: Health and Safety
Lancet Titles
MEDLINE®
New England Journal of Medicine
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS®)

Pharmaceutical & Biomedical
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
Allied & Complementary Medicine™
Analytical Abstracts
Bacteriology Abstracts (Microbiology B)
British Library Inside Conferences
British Nursing Index
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology Abstracts
COVID-19 Research
Ecology Abstracts
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
ESPICOM Pharmaceutical & Medical Device News
FDAnews
Gale Group Computer Database™
Gale Group Health Periodicals Database
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PharmaBiomed Business Journals
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
Health & Safety Science Abstracts
Industrial and Applied Microbiology Abstracts (Microbiology A)
Inspec®
Lancet Titles
MEDLINE®
New England Journal of Medicine
Oceanic Abstracts
ProQuest Biological & Health Science Professional
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS®)
Toxfile®
Toxicology Abstracts
TOXLINE

Telecommunications & Computing
ABI/INFORM® Professional Standard
British Library Inside Conferences
Business & Industry
Business Monitor International
Economist Intelligence Unit
Emerging Markets Direct
Energy Science and Technology
Gale Group Computer Database™
Gale Group New Product Announcements / Plus®
Gale Group Newsletter Database™
Gale Group PROMT®
Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™
Inspec®
Proquest Newstand Professional
ProQuest Research
ProQuest Technology Research Professional
UBM Computer Full Text

Proquest Subcollections Of Specific Databases

Proquest Biological & Health Science Professional¹

Algology Mycology and Protozoology Abstracts (Microbiology C)
Animal Behavior Abstracts
Biochemistry Abstracts 1
Biochemistry Abstracts 3
Biotechnology Research Abstracts
Calcium & Calcified Tissue Abstracts
Chemoreception Abstracts
Endocrinology Abstracts
Entomology Abstracts
Genetics Abstracts
Human Genome Abstracts
Immunology Abstracts
Neurosciences Abstracts
Nucleic Acids
Oncogenes and Growth Factors Abstracts
Plant Sciences
Virology and AIDS Abstracts

Proquest Technology Research Professional³

Abstracts in New Technology & Engineering
Civil Engineering Abstracts
Earthquake Engineering Abstracts
Mechanical & Transportation Engineering Abstracts

1 Pharmaceutical & Biomedical
2 Energy & Environment; Food & Agriculture
3 Aerospace & Defense; Automotive; Engineering & Technology; Telecommunications & Computing
4 Energy & Environment

Proquest Environmental Science Professional²

Aqualine
Environment Abstracts
Environmental Engineering Abstracts
Environmental Impact Statements: Digests
Meteorological & Geoastrophysical Abstracts
Pollution Abstracts
Risk Abstracts
Sustainability Science Abstracts
Water Resources Abstracts

Note: Both the Proquest Advanced Tech & Aerospace Professional AND Proquest Materials Research Professional subcollections are included as a part of the Proquest Technology Research Professional:

Proquest Advanced Tech & Aerospace Professional

Aerospace Database
Computer and Information Systems Abstracts
Electronics & Communications Abstracts
Solid State and Superconductivity Abstracts

Proquest Materials Research Professional⁴

Aluminum Industry Abstracts
Ceramic Abstracts
Copper Technical Reference Library
Corrosion Abstracts
Engineered Materials Abstracts
Materials Business File
Metadex

ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is home to almost one-quarter of the world’s peer-reviewed full-text scientific, technical and medical content. Over 15 million researchers, health care professionals, teachers, students and information professionals around the globe rely on ScienceDirect as a trusted source of nearly 2,500 journals and close to 39,000 e-books. ScienceDirect supports research and education with interactive elements in articles such as audio, video, graphs, tables and images, and offers tools so users can easily set alerts. Content on ScienceDirect also features embedded links to external datasets, including earth and environmental science data from PANGAEA, abstract and indexing data from Scopus and chemical reactions data from Reaxys. With almost 16 million content pieces available—including pre-publication release of articles and open access content from Elsevier journals, and 330,000 topic pages—ScienceDirect is a premier platform for discovering the world of research.

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) Xplore®
A non-profit, technical professional association of more than 365,000 individual members in approximately 150 countries. Owing to its members, the IEEE is a leading authority in technical areas ranging from computer engineering, biomedical technology, and telecommunications, to electric power, aerospace engineering and consumer electronics, among others. Through its technical publishing, conferences and consensus-based standards activities, the IEEE produces 30 percent of the world’s published literature in electrical and electronics engineering, and computer science areas. IEEE Xplore content comprises 195+ journals, 1,900+ annual conferences, 9,000+ standards, approximately 2,400 books, and 485+ educational courses

STN
CAPLUS (CAS)
MARPAT (CAS)
REGISTRY (CAS)

LexisNexis
News, Markets and Companies
Over 12,000 individual sources covering aggregate news sources, industry trade press, magazines/ journals, newspapers, newswires/press releases, newsletters, and web based publications; this is available in conjunction with the premium intellectual property content listed above, and the ip content contains content covering treatises, analytical materials, Matthew Bender publications, and reference type resources.

Trademark
US Federal & US State, Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, European Community, Paraguay, United Kingdom, Uruguay and WIPO registrations.

Copyright
U.S. Copyrights – Legal Documents, Monographs, and Serials
Intellectual Property Material
Legislation, Statutes & Codes | Administrative Materials & Regulations | Court Materials & Jury Instructions | Treatises & Analytical Material

FREE ACCESS

WTi Frankfurt
German-language database platform with over 15 science and technology collections, including TEMA®, a database covering mechanical and plant engineering, electrical engineering, information technology, energy technology, materials, textiles, medical engineering, and more. TEMA® contents include journals, conference proceedings, reports, and dissertations, as well as non-conventional literature such as informally published “gray” literature. Other notable databases on WTi Frankfurt include the CEABA® Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology database, and the ESTEC Technologies for the Environment and Sustainability database. Contents are in German or English.

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library
ACM is a large educational and scientific computing society, which provides resources for advance computing. ACM’s Digital Library contains a full text searchable collection of ACM journals, magazines, transactions, newsletter articles and conference proceedings.

3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2)
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) unites six telecommunications standard development organizations (ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TTA, TTC) and provides their members with a stable environment to produce the highly successful Reports and Specifications that define 3GPP technologies. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) is a collaboration between telecommunications associations to make a globally applicable third generation (3G) mobile phone system specification within the scope of the ITU’s IMT-2000 project.

PubMed
The National Library of Medicine provides access to bibliographic information for biomedical and life sciences covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences containing over 26 million citations from Medline from over 5,200 journals, and books, of which 5 million articles are available fulltext freely or of selective participation from 3,963 journals in the PMC database (fulltext articles database).

IP.com Prior Art Database
Prior Art, and Non-Patent Literature and patent publications from Authorities and DOCDB.

World Wide Web

Google Scholar

Public Libraries, Universities, Academic & Research Institutions

Special Sources
Cardinal employs a full-time library scientist and staff who specialize in hard to find and unique NPL sources

Sequence & Chemical Structure Sources

SEARCH DATABASES

GenomeQuest

Keyword Searching
Keyword searching allows retrieval of patents or public references, and the sequence searching allows the alignment of the sequences to both patents and public references. Patent databases includes access to GQ-Pat, covering the US, EPO, WPO, Japanese, and Korean documents; with public databases including Protein Databank, GenBank, RefSeq, Swissprot, TrEMBL (with Swissprot together they form Uniprot).

Sequence Searching
Searches a proprietary patent database indexed for peptide and nucleic acid sequence searching, GQPat, which includes United States (US), European Patent Office (EP), and Patent Cooperation Treaty (WO) patents as well as emerging collections from authorities such as Brazil (BR), China (CN) and India (IN). GenomeQuest also includes many other open-access sequence databases such as GenBank, Embl, Swiss-Prot, etc.

GENBANK BLAST
The NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information’s free Basic Local Alignment Sequence Tool searches genetic sequences present in patents and non-patent publications. Contains several sources of sequences, including GenBank, RefSeq, etc., providing access to genome, gene and transcript sequence data.

STN
STN enables exact match and substructure chemical structure querying of the Derwent World Patent Index (DWPI) file as well as the CAS REGISTRY which may subsequently be used to identify literature citations present in CAPlus.

ChemSpider
ChemSpider is a free chemical registry that allows searching of chemical names by systematic names, synonyms, trade names, and database identifiers with structure search performed using a simple search, chemical structure search, or advanced search. A search of a chemical name or structure within ChemSpider will generally yield synonyms, physical properties, data sources, patents, and non-patent literature.

PubChem
PubChem is a free chemical search produced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) allowing the user to search by bioassays, compound, or chemical substances. The search generally provides the structures, synonyms, chemical identification, chemical and physical properties, pharmacological action, patents, and nonpatent literature, and run BLAST sequencing analysis.

SureChEMBL
SureChem patent website has been acquired by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and being rebranded as SureChEMBL (December 2013). Free resource for researchers, information professionals, and others who need access and to link their chemistry content with patents.