Patents are a very special kind of publication. Looking for a patent you know specific information about can be searched by using the patent number (e.g. EP2366664) or the inventor’s name. To find patents about a specific technology is much more difficult due to legal terminology used in patents.

Patents can be downloaded for free at the patent offices. Another way to get your PDF very quickly is to use a web service (by IVS-CPT), you just need the patent number.

Free patent databases:

• esp@cenet (European Patent Office)
  The database covers 40 million patents from 71 countries.
• DEPATISnet (German Patent and Trade Mark Office)
• USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

A number of patent databases, licensed for the Max Planck Society, are available via the web interface STNEasy.
Most bibliographic databases like Web of Science and Scopus do not contain patents. But one database that indexes patents is SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts). It covers patent references from 61 patent authorities around the world.

If you have a request about patent information and your searches in the available databases are not sufficient you should contact the information services of the MPS.