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Publication number

The publication number is the number assigned to a patent application on publication. Publication numbers are generally made up of a country code (two letters) and a serial number (variable, one to twelve digits) (eg DE202004009768).


The publication numbers of published US applications, however, consist of 11 digits (eg US20040046892). Normally only the number of the first publication level is searchable.


The format of PCT (WO) publication numbers from 1978 until 30/06/2002 was WOYYnnnnn (2 year digits and 5 numerics). Then the format changed from 1/7/2002 until 31/12/2003 and was WOYYnnnnnn (2 years and 6 numerics) and since 1/1/2004 the format is WOYYYYnnnnnn (4 year digits and 6 numerics).


For certain countries, if you know the kind code, we recommend adding it to the end of the number in order to retrieve the document you want, eg ES1005422U. These countries are : Austria (AT), Chile (CL), China (CN), Germany (DE), Denmark (DK), Spain (ES), Finland (FI), Japan (JP), Korea (KR), The Netherlands (NL), Norway (NO), Poland (PL), Romenia (RO), Sweden (SE), Turkey (TR), Taiwan (TW), and Serbia and Montenegro (YU).


In the publication number field, you may enter a maximum of ten numbers which will automatically be separated by the default operator OR.

When typing in a publication number, do not leave any spaces between the country code and the number.

To retrieve all the documents having a particular country code in combination with other search criteria (for example the date), all you have to do is enter the country code in the publication number field in combination with, in this example, the date in the publication date field.


The information found behind the left-hand sidebar options "bibliographic data", "description", "claims", "original document" and "inpadoc legal status" concern the patent application (A document). In order to view the granted patent information, look at the original B document under the section "Also published as". The publication date of the B document can also be found under the link "INPADOC patent family".


If you cannot retrieve the patent application with the publication number you are looking for, please contact the Espacenet helpdesk at espacenet@epo.org.


For more information on patent searching, see the following pages: