Limitations

The following search limitations apply in Espacenet:

• Maximum of ten search terms per field.
• Maximum of 20 search terms and 19 operators per mask.
• Left truncation not supported.
• Search terms in the abstract have to be entered in English to ensure correct results are retrieved.
• Slashes can only be used for date entries and ECLA / IPC symbol entries.
• Applicant/inventor names are not searchable in documents published in other alphabets (Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese etc.).
• Diacritical characters (umlauts and accents) and slashes are not allowed when searching abstracts in the worldwide database.
• Stop words - common words such as FOR, WITH, THE, BUT, AND, OF, ANY, etc. - are not searchable as they would otherwise produce too many results.
• You cannot retrieve an XP document with the name of the author or limit a search to XP documents only.

The following limitations apply to results in Espacenet:

• Maximum of 100 000 results per query but only the first 500 matching documents are listed.
• EP and WO documents with up to 500 pages can be downloaded in a single operation.
• Other patent documents with up to 250 pages can be downloaded in a single operation.
• Maximum of 100 documents stored in "My patents list" for one year.
• You can save a maximum of ten queries in the query history.
• RSS feed only works with the result list.
• The download function in "My patents list" only works if the number of pages does not exceed 500 pages.
• You must enable cookies on your PC.
• No statistical analysis possible. See the annual report and at the following page .