Search Options

How-to-Use

The PatentsView application programming interface (API) provides web developers and researchers programmatic access to longitudinal data and metadata on patents, inventors, companies, and geographic locations.

Use the Search Options to the left to input search terms and filter selections related to patents, inventors, assignees, classes, locations, and dates, in order to search the PatentsView database of over 5 million US patents, 1.2 million inventors, and 250,000 assignees.

Use the data display options above to view results by Patent, Inventor, Assignee, or Class. When Class is selected, the default view is CPC. Use the pulldown menu to select NBER or USPC instead.

Results appear as a list. In the Patent view, the list can be adjusted to view more or less detail about each patent by clicking Expand Patent Summary “+” or Collapse Patent Summary -.

Search Options

Click “+” to expand any search parameter. Run a search query by choosing the Search button on the top bar, selecting the search icon at the end of each input field, or hitting “Enter.” There must be input in at least one field or a dropdown selection made in order to run a search.

Once a search has been run, search terms will appear as tags. The tags can be removed by clicking the x, after which a new query will be run.

Click - to close any search parameter.

Use the Reset button to reset all search parameters to their defaults and remove all search terms and tags.

Return to earlier queries using the browser back button.

Comma-separated search terms can be processed for all search parameters except Location. Additional search terms may be entered to refine a search that has already be run.

Some search parameters contain options for how search terms are run. The “with all of the words” option (AND) performs a search that finds the words in the fields being searched. The “with at least one of the words” option (OR) runs a query that finds at least one of the words in the fields being searched. The “exact phrase” option (“ “) option finds the specific phrase in any of the fields being searched. The default option is “with all of the words.”

Filter Options

Patent

Search for patents by patent number, patent title, or keyword found in a title. Filter results by patent type by selecting utility, design, and/or plant.

Inventor

Search for inventors by first name or last name or both.

Assignee

Search for assignees by organization name, or by first name or last name or both.

Patent Class

Select a patent class, then search by the class symbol or number or by the name. For each patent, the invention CPC section, class, and subclass, the NBER primary subcategory, and the USPC primary main class are included in the database. All classifications are current class.

Location

Enter a country or US state to begin, then add a city. The location parameter is dependent on the data display view. When the Patent or Class data display is selected, at-issue locations are searchable by inventors, assignees, or both. When the Inventor or Assignee data display is selected, the most recent locations are searchable.

Date

The database contains records from 1976 to 2016. Enter a single year (yyyy), a month of a year (mm/yyyy), or a range (yyyy-yyyy or mm/yyyy-mm/yyyy).Return to earlier queries using the browser back button.

Comma-separated search terms can be processed for all search parameters except Location. Additional search terms may be entered to refine a search that has already be run.

Some search parameters contain options for how search terms are run. The “with all of the words” option (AND) performs a search that finds the words in the fields being searched. The “with at least one of the words” option (OR) runs a query that finds at least one of the words in the fields being searched. The “exact phrase” option (“ “) option finds the specific phrase in any of the fields being searched. The default option is “with all of the words.”

Patent Class

Patents are classified by three distinct schemes in the PatentsView data visualization tool. These are US patent classification (USPC), the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC). All USPC, NBER, and CPC patent classes appearing in the visualization tool represent the current patent class, unless otherwise noted. For more information on patent classifications, visit the methods and sources page.  

For each patent, the USPC primary main class, the NBER primary subcategory, and all CPC subsections and classes are searchable. Select a patent classification system and use the class symbol or number as a keyword in your search filters. 

Government Interest

Data are extracted from the government interest statement on a patent. Government organization name and contract or grant number are then parsed and structured using the Stanford-maintained Named Entity Recognition library and information retrieval techniques. The government organization name is mapped to the current hierarchy of the U.S. federal government organizations. For more information, visit the government interest sources and methods page.