Corresponding documents

Normally in English, corresponding documents are representative members of a patent family , the idea being that every document belonging to the PCT minimum documentation has a corresponding English abstract in the database.

Corresponding documents are chosen in the order shown below:

• The EP document in English (where available)
• The US document (where available)
• The GB document (where available)

Although not all documents have an English abstract, there are more than 29 million that do. English-language abstracts are available for all patent specifications from the PCT minimum documentation (except for some of the more recent ones, which are still being processed) and their corresponding documents dating from 1970 onwards, and in some cases even earlier than that.

If an English document cannot be found, your search will return documents in the order shown below:

• document in German (where available)
• document in French (where available)
• document in another language (where available)