Quick Help

Quickhelp questions

Quickhelp Answers

What does A1, A2, A3 and B mean after an EP publication number, which appears sometimes under the Also published as list?

When a European patent application is published with the search report, it is an A1 publication. When this application is published as an A2 document, the search report is not included. The search report will be published later on 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 happens if I click on the "Register" button?

If you click on the "Register" link (where activated) for a particular country this takes you straight to the corresponding entry in the national register concerned. For EP and Euro-PCT documents, clicking on the "EP Register" button allows you to view all the information pertaining to the patent application concerned, from first publication through to grant and beyond (legal status data, patent family details, etc.) in the European Patent Register.

Why are some tabs grey 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. As such, for any particular document, it may be that we do not have the full text and/or the images of the document, even though we do have the bibliographic data. In this case, the tabs normally used for accessing this data will be greyed.

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 title Also published as appear sometimes and what are these documents?

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

Why do I sometimes see the abstract of a correspondent document?

The aim of espacenet® is to have an English language abstract available for each set of correspondent patents (also known as equivalents). Where the document retrieved during the search has no English abstract available, but one does exist for a correspondent document, we will display this abstract.

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.