Patents

What is a patent?

A patent is a contract between the state and an inventor by which a temporary monopoly is granted in return for disclosing all details of the invention. For researchers, patents are an important source of scientific and technical information. Patents are often the earliest source of information on a new technology.

How do I determine if a patent on "topic x" exists?

To determine if a patent exists you may search the following databases:

Derwent Innovations Index is one of the world's most comprehensive databases of patents information. Over 11 million basic inventions and 20 million patents are covered from over 40 patent-issuing authorities dating back to 1963. Derwent provides access to the fulltext of most patents. Document Delivery may be available to access patents not available in full text.
esp@cenet is Europe's network of patent databases. esp@cenet provides access to the fulltext of the patents dating back to 1836. Using esp@cenet it is possible to search a worldwide database of published patents from over 80 countries and regions. esp@cenet can be accessed from the UQ Library Catalogue or is freely available on the Internet.
Scifinder contains information on patents and patent families in all areas of chemistry and chemical engineering from 50 patent issuing authorities. It is possible to search for patents using CAS registry numbers and chemical structures as well as keyword and inventor searches.
USPTO Web patent database provides access to US patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office back to 1790. Full text searching is available for US patents after 1975 and for earlier patents - patent number and classification searching is available. US Patent applications can be searched on the US Patent and Trademark Office site.
Google Patents provides access to patents from the United States or the European patent offices. The Prior Art Finder allows for discovery of documents related to a particular patent application or grant.

How do I access Derwent Innovations Index?

Derwent Innovations Index can be accessed from the UQ Library Catalogue.

Why use Derwent Innovations Index?

Is the most comprehensive database of patents published since 1963.
Translates into English the key aspects of non-English language patents.
Includes patent family information which tracks the same invention through countries and any revisions.
Makes searching more effective by adding meaningful titles to the patent.
Provides detailed abstracts covering the novelty, claims, detailed description and technical focus.
Provides links to the fulltext of most patents and therefore the original title of the patent.
Provides links to journal articles and patents that are related to the displayed patent.
Imports into EndNote - please note that you will need to edit the title of the patent back to the original title.

Tips on searching Derwent Innovations Index

Click on the 'Help' icon on the right-hand side of the screen for full details on using search fields.
Remember that you are searching a Derwent enhanced title so if you are searching for a specific patent you may not be able to use the original title.
Patent number searching has a specific format for example, to search for patent number WO 02/083181 on Derwent WO200283181 would be required. See the Help for more information.
Derwent includes classification codes which can be used to enhance searches for a specific category of inventions. Search aids are available for most classification codes to the right of the search box or from Help

Derwent Chemistry Resource

Derwent Chemistry Resource can be used to search for chemical structures, synonyms, molecular formulae and weights, and other chemical attributes.Thomson Reuters supports the following operating systems and browsers for searching the Derwent Chemistry Resource database in Web of Knowledge.

Windows XP or Windows 7
Internet Explorer 8.0 or 9.0

To create compound structures in Derwent Innovations Index, you must be able to use the Accelrys JDraw applet. It is necessary for Java to be enabled for the Accelrys JDraw applet to work.

Further help using Compound search