Patents

Many of the national and international patent offices provide searchable patents databases, for example:

European Patent Office (EPO): the EPO's collection of over 90 million international patent documents is available online via the free Espacenet service. You can obtain official copies of European patent documents (applications and granted patents) via the European Publication Server. 

Intellectual Property Office (UK): the official government body responsible for UK intellectual property rights, which is responsible for examining and issuing or rejecting patents. You can search Ipsum to check the status and access information on UK patent applications. For greater searching functionality, use the Espacenet service of the European Patent Office. 

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal agency responsible for granting US patents and registering trademarks. You can search for US patents and patent applications in the Patent full-text databases.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a self-funding agency of the United Nations (UN), and is the global forum for intellectual property (IP) services, policy, information and cooperation. Its activities include services to protect IP across borders and to resolve disputes, and the provision of technical infrastructure to connect IP systems and share knowledge. Its PATENTSCOPE Search Service is a comprehensive searchable database of patents and patent applications.

Directories

These online directories enable you to search for Intellectual Property (IP) and patents offices worldwide:

• Directory of Intellectual Property Offices: alphabetical list of links to worldwide IP offices, produced by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The WIPO is the global forum for intellectual property services, policy, information and cooperation.
• The European Patent Office (EPO) website provides a directory of the patent offices of its member states and another for patent offices outside the EPO.

Information Centres

Patent information centres (collectively known as PATLIB, short for PATent LIBrary) can be found throughout the EPO member states. They have qualified and experienced local staff who can offer practical assistance on different kinds of intellectual property rights.

• The European Patent Office (EPO) website provides a directory of patent information centres, which is a list of links arranged by country, intellectual property rights covered, and services offered.
• The UK Intellectual Property Office provides information on the 15 UK patent information centres, including contact information and the services available. One such is the Exeter Business and IP Centre, based in the Business Hub in Exeter Library (Castle Street).

Scopus holds details of patents from five patent offices:

• US Patent & Trademark Office
• European Patent Office
• Japan Patent Office
• World Intellectual Property Organization
• UK Intellectual Property Office

Run a search as normal and you will find Patents results at the top of your results list, as shown in the screenshot below.

Web of Science: Cited Reference Search for Patents

While patents are not indexed in the citation databases of the platform Web of Science, citations to patent documents are searchable in the Web of Science Cited Reference Search feature. Cited Reference Search is available in the following databases: All Databases, Web of Science Core Collection, BIOSIS Citation Index, Chinese Science Citation Database, Data Citation Index, SciELO Citation Index.

To do a Cited Reference Search for patents, enter the patent number in the Cited Title field. Do not specify a country code. For example, enter “5015744” to look up references to patent US5015744. This search will retrieve results for citations to patents from source items indexed in the database.  The example below is from Web of Science Core Collection.

To see the citing articles check the box to the left of the cited author, and click See Results.