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Engineering & Technology

Find Standards

Standard Development Life Cycle (source IEEE Standard Association website)

"A prescribed set of rules, conditions, or requirements concerning definitions of terms; classification of components; specification of materials, performance, or operations; delineation of procedures; or measurement of quantity and quality in describing materials, products, systems, services, or practices."

- National Standards Policy Advisory Committee

"A standard is a document that provides requirements, specifications, guidelines or characteristics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes and services are fit for their purpose."
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

Patents - Introduction

USPTO site provides a variety of useful patent information including information about the patent process for inventors.

Patent classifications:

  • International Patent Classification (IPC) - Used by the patent offices worldwide
  • Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) - an extension of the IPC and is jointly managed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the USPTO.

Major types of patents:

  1. Utility Patents - "granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or compositions of matters, or any new useful improvement thereof"
  2. Design Patents- "granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture"
  3. Plant Patents - "granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant"

Find US Patents

Derwent Innovations Index (Patent coverage from 1963-present; citations from 1973-present) (Derwent World Patent Index® and patent citation information from Patents Citation Index®) - access via Web of Knowledge database

Google Patents - Search more than seven million U.S. patents issued in the 1790s through those most recently issued in the past few months

Patents at USPTO - US patent full-text database search.

Find International Patents

Free online access to patent collections is provided by many countries.

Stopfakes.Gov provides informative Toolkits that give an overview of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) environment in various countries around the world.

PATENTSCOPE ® Search Service provided by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); Can search 30 million patent documents including 2.2 million published international patent applications; provides a list of international patent databases.