The European Patent Office

Contributing to a knowledge-based

economy in Europe

Wistre Rodriguez Feb. 2008

Background to esp@cenet

• The database of ideas

• What it is...

• ... and what it is not

Searching in esp@cenetDatabase content - Coverage

Searching in esp@cenetDatabase content - Coverage

• Coverage

• Limitations

• esp@cenet vs. commercial patent databases

• Be aware

Coverage - Numbers

• 1.9 million Hits per week.

• 65 million documents accessible.

• More than 24 Tbytes downloaded Data.

• More than 73 million different IP addresses accessing / year.

Searching in esp@cenetLimitations

• Maximum 4 search terms per field

• Maximum 21 search terms and 20 operators per mask

• Search terms in the abstract must be in English

Searching in esp@cenetLimitations

• AND is the only allowed operator used when combining search fields

• There are truncation limitations

• It is not possible to search within date ranges

• No Boolean operator (AND, OR, NOT) in the publication date (default operator is OR)

Searching in esp@cenetLimitations

• Classification

• Maximum 20 documents stored in "My patents list" - at the moment

Searching in esp@cenet

• http://ep.espacenet.com

Searching in esp@cenetQuick Search

Searching in esp@cenetQuick Search

EP documents published in the last two years

Worldwide database containing almost 60 million documents

WIPO documents published in the last two years

Keywords in English

Searching in esp@cenetAdvanced Search

More complex search possibilities

Searching in esp@cenetNumber Search

Number search

Searching in esp@cenetHit lists and how to manage them

Searching in esp@cenetHit lists and how to manage them

• Contain the information relating to your search as well as a list of the titles found

• Only the first 500 results will be retrieved

• Compact list shows 30 hits and advanced list shows 15 hits

• The function "compact" allows you to obtain a more compact view of the result list (30 titles per page)

• Button "Refine search" to use in case of more than 500 results OR "0" result found

Searching in esp@cenetDocuments and how to navigate

Click on this link to open the document

Searching in esp@cenetDocuments and how to navigate

Searching in esp@cenetOutput

• Reading

• Understanding

• Printing

User support

esp@cenet assistant

User support

User support

Help index

Quick help

Useful links and contact persons

• esp@cenet portal www.espacenet.com

• esp@cenet helpdesk espacenet@epo.org

• esp@cenet forum http://forum.espacenet.com

• esp@cenet marketing lmcdonald@epo.org

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© European Patent Office 2006

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