Tag Archives: Patents

Online Workshops on Citavi, EndNote and Patent Search

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A new series of online workshops has started today.

Some of the workshops in March 2012:

  • Searching for Patents in Open Sources – March 2
  • Reference Management with Citavi – March 6
  • Literaturverwaltungssysteme – Einführung und Überblick (in German) – March 9
  • Literaturverwaltung mit EndNote (in German) – March 13
  • Reference Management Systems – Introduction and Overview – March 14
  • Reference Management with EndNote – March 20

Attendance is free of charge for staff and guests of the Max Planck Society, but online registration is required. Workshops usually begin at 10.30 am and last 90 minutes.

The online workshops are offered by the Scientific Information Retrieval Services for the Biology & Medicine Section of the Max Planck Society. Find more details on schedule, technical requirements and registration at
http://www.biochem.mpg.de/en/facilities/ivs/SupportTraining/Workshop/Schedule/index.html

Searching for patents

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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.