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Kind codes
The following is a list of European and international patent document kind codes.
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EP-A documents: |
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European patent applications, published 18 months after filing with the EPO or 18 months after the priority date |
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A1 |
European patent application published with European search report |
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A2 |
European patent application published without European search report (search report not available at publication date) |
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A3 |
Separate publication of European search report |
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A4 |
Supplementary search report |
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A8 |
Corrected title page of A document, ie. A1 or A2 document |
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A9 |
Complete reprint of A document, ie. A1, A2 or A3 document. |
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EP-B documents: |
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European patent specifications |
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B1 |
European patent specification (granted patent) |
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B2 |
New European patent specification (amended specification after opposition procedure) |
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B3 |
European patent specification (after limitation procedure) |
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B8 |
Corrected title page of B document (i.e. B1 or B2 document) |
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B9 |
Complete reprint of B document (i.e. B1 or B2 document) |
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WO-A documents: |
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A1 |
International application published with international search report |
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A2 |
International application published without international search report or (from 1 January 2009 onwards) international application published with declaration under Article 17(2)(a) |
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A3 |
Later publication of ISR with revised front page |
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A4 |
(from 1 January 2009 onwards) Later publication of amended claims and/or statement (Art.19) |
In addition to documents having the "standard" kind codes A, B, C (which do not need to be entered in the search mask to retrieve patent documents), Espacenet contains other documents (utility models, reissued patents, etc.) with more unusual kind codes used by other patent-granting authorities. Go to the Useful tables and statistics section and click on Kind code concordance list under Updated regularly for a list of all the kind codes corresponding to the different publication stages of a patent application.
If you are unable to find a specific code, please contact the national patent office concerned to check why that code is not listed. It may have been replaced or may no longer be valid.
For certain countries, if you know the kind code, you should enter it at the end of the number in order to retrieve the document requested e.g. (ES1005422U). These countries are: Austria (AT), Chile (CL), China (CN), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), Germany (DE), Japan (JP), Korea (KR), Norway (NO), Poland (PL), Romania (RO), Serbia and Montenegro (YU), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), Taiwan (TW), The Netherlands (NL) and Turkey (TR).
For more information on kind codes, see the WIPO handbook.