Featured Resource: QPAT - Questel Patent Search
Posted on Thu, Aug 18, 2011
QPAT is a patent search system run by Questel-Orbit, a well-known and respected patent information service. The organizational system behind QPAT has existed ever since the first ORBIT search engine in 1972, and QPAT has been available in its online form since 1996. The database holds millions of full-text and abstract-only patents, and has a special focus on international and non-English documents.
Dynamic Organization
QPAT employs its parent company’s product, the FamPat database. This system groups similar patents together into “families.” FamPat is constantly updating to keep the size of the families manageable and exclusive. This system helps researchers to stay organized and on topic during patent searchers. It can also open up previously unseen avenues towards discovering prior art, by suggesting similar and relevant documents and searches. To make organization even simpler, researchers can use many advanced options for highlighting and saving specific passages and pages in patents, making it easy to go back and compare references.
QPAT also supports workfile sharing, providing an environment that promotes collaborative knowledge and the greater good. This is symbolic of the open atmosphere at QPAT, which in turn fosters more productive searches.
Worldwide Searches
One of the strongest and most useful features is the international approach QPAT takes. Its extensive database has records from patents offices all around the world, including Europe and many Asian countries. These can all be searched in multiple languages, using QPAT’s multi-lingual search tool. This tool automatically translates key search terms into a variety of different languages, which will then return relevant materials. This can help consolidate the research process, as searchers do not need to maintain a separate database for every international patent office. Also, this makes it easy for researchers who do not speak multiple languages to still find foreign documents, which are often among the most helpful on the path to uncovering prior art.
Another way QPAT helps support global searching is the “Browse Index Feature.” This feature will take translated words and provide a list of alternate spellings. It is especially helpful for inventions and inventors with translated names, as sometimes the translations can differ in separate databases. By providing a list of the possible spelling options, QPAT makes it easier to link different databases and possibly uncover more information.
QPAT is also dedicated to improving its system. Updates are consistently applied, such as adding full text Taiwanese and Korean patent applications. QPAT works hard to adapt their saved records tracking to respond to feedback, as well as suit the needs of their researchers.
QPAT is available through a subscription. Users have a variety of different payment options, from paying for each individual search result to buying a yearlong pass. While this is just a brief overview, you can learn more information about QPAT and other resources at Intellogist.com.
To find more research tools, visit Article One’s Resources & Tools page.