Electrical Engineering
| This is a guide to finding selected Electrical Engineering resources. For in-depth assistance, please contact the subject specialist, or Ask a Librarian. |  | Subject Specialist: Charles Uth email: uth@iit.edu phone: 312.567.5319 |
Patents are important in research because they may be the only source of technical information available from a company regarding their research.
esp@cenet
The European Patent Office online database of international patents. The EPO features a searchable database of patents issued by more than 50 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. Japan and Germany issue patents faster than the United States. Search these countries' patents first for the most recent breakthroughs. The EPO also indexes U.S. patents starting from 1920, allowing you to search by author, title, or abstract words. Use EPO for finding U.S. patents issued between 1920 and 1975.
USPTO - U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
The USPTO's database includes the full text of all patents issued since 1790. All patents are searchable by patent number and classification number. Patents issued since 1976 are searchable by keyword in the full text of the patent. Images are in TIFF format, which requires a special plug-in for your browser, such as "alternatiff" (alternatiff.com). If you can't install a TIFF reader, US patents can be converted to Adobe PDF format and downloaded at pat2pdf.org.
