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What does A1, A2, A3 and B stand for after an EP publication number in the "Also published as" list?

When a European patent application is published together with the search report, it is known as an A1 publication. When this application is published without the search report, it is an A2 document. The search report is then published later as an A3 document. When the patent is granted, it is published as a B document.

What happens if I click on "In my patents list"?

Clicking on "In my patents list" adds the document to your "My patents list". The star appears in red as soon as the document is in the list. You can store up to 100 documents in this list. The list expires after one year of non-use. This period resets automatically each time you modify the list.

What information will I find if I click on the link "View document in the European Register"?

The European Register contains all the information pertaining to the patent application you are interested in, from first publication through to grant and beyond (legal status data, patent family details, etc.)

Why are some tabs deactivated for certain documents?

Although the espacenet® database is continually being expanded to include additional countries and more extensive coverage, we do not have all items of data for all documents. For example, we may have the bibliographic data for a particular document, but not the full text or the images of the document. In this case, the tabs normally used for accessing the missing data will be deactivated.

How can I bookmark this page?

Simply right-click on the page bookmark link and select "Add to Favorites/Bookmarks" from the context menu.

Why does a list of documents with the heading "Also published as" sometimes appear, and what are these documents?

A single invention can be the subject of a patent application in many different countries. In espacenet® , these related applications are known as corresponding documents or "equivalents", and it is these that are listed under the "Also published as" heading. Selecting any of them will give you access to a facsimile. In many cases you will be able to read the document in the language of your choice, in the knowledge that the content is very similar if not identical (other than in the language), to that of the document retrieved in the course of your search. Corresponding documents will only be listed if available in facsimile form.

Why do I sometimes find the abstract of a corresponding document?

The aim of espacenet® is to have an English-language abstract available for each set of corresponding patents (also known as equivalents). When a document retrieved during the search does not have an English-language abstract, but there is one available for a corresponding document, the latter is displayed.

What happens if I click on the red "patent translate" button?

This feature provides machine translations of English abstracts into one of the supported languages, and of non-English texts into English. The text for translation is sent to specially "trained" machine translation engines, jointly developed by the EPO and Google, where it is processed and returned to the user.