Report:FreePatentsOnline/Data Coverage/Patent Coverage/Full Text Coverage/United States (US)
From Intellogist
| Report | Patent Coverage Map | Ratings | Comments |
| This search system report was created by the Intellogist Team and is available for viewing only. If you'd like to share your knowledge on Intellogist, please visit the Best Practices, Glossary, or Community Reports pages. Registered users may be notified of any substantial changes to this report by placing a "watch" on the Revisions page, which is the last page listed in the table of contents. To learn more about using the Intellogist "watchlist," see the Watchlist Help page. | |
  |
|
United States
FreePatentsOnline has full text coverage of United States (US) granted patents from 1/19/1971 onwards. This coverage starts 5 years earlier than the complete data provided by the USPTO due to the incorporation of other data sources and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) data. From 1976 onwards, USPTO data is used. PDF files are provided for US granted patents dating back to the first issued patent.
US patent applications have full text coverage from March 15, 2001 onwards. This coverage matches the available data provided from the USPTO to all patent search systems and is the full collection. [1]
Bibliographic information is generally provided for US patent records whether or not the record has full text data available in FreePatentsOnline, although there are some cases where bibliographic information is not available when the full text data is not present.
Additionally, FreePatentsOnline has some full text coverage of US reissue patents, US design patents, US plant patents, US defensive publications, and US statutory invention registrations, generally to the early 1970’s. PDF coverage of these categories dates back to the first publication in each category except defensive publications, where PDF coverage starts on 2/4/1969.
Withdrawn US patents are present and can be found by searching for the patent number. No information is available for these documents besides the statement that the patent has been withdrawn. The list of withdrawn patents is kept current with the official list provided by the USPTO.
Editor's Note:FreePatentsOnline has good US patent data coverage. The inclusion of an extra 5 years of full text coverage of granted patents beyond USPTO data and having PDF copies of nearly all publicly available data in the US patent system are points of strength. Some gaps of bibliographic data pop up here and there, but these gaps are “backed up” by the presence of the PDF file in all cases.
Sources
- ↑ Chartrand, Sabra. "Patents: Patent Application on Web Sends Inventor to the Drawing Board." April 2, 2001. New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/technology/02PATE.html?ex=1222228800&en=28f749d247dc65e8&ei=5070. Accessed September 22, 2008.
