Search Terms
Search Fields
Each search term box is ANDed together, and each synonym field within a box is ORed. Pressing TAB will add a new synonym/OR field, and pressing ENTER will add a new search term/AND box.
Keywords: Enter a few words that form a single concept. Keywords match the title, abstract, claims and description fields. seat belt searches these two words, or their plurals and close synonyms. "seat belt" searches this exact phrase, in order. -seat -belt searches for documents not containing either word.
Cooperative Patent Classifications (CPCs): These are commonly used to represent ideas in place of keywords, and can also be entered in a search term box. If you're searching for seat belts, you could also search for B60R22/00 to retrieve documents that mention safety belts or body harnesses.
Boolean syntax (USPTO or EPO format): For more complicated searches, full boolean logic is supported. The default operator is AND with left associativity. Note: this means safety OR seat belt is searched as (safety OR seat) AND belt. Each word automatically includes plurals and close synonyms, and CPCs can also be used without a special syntax, like (safety belt) OR B60R22/00. Adjacent words that are implicitly ANDed together, such as (safety belt), are treated as a phrase when generating synonyms.
Proximity: You can use proximity operators to boost the score of documents if they contain expressions near each other. Note: proximity operators only change ranking, not retrieval. NEAR, NEARx, NEAR/x, or /xw means matches are a maximum of x words away, in any order. WITH means 20 words away, any order, and SAME means 200 words away, any order. ADJ, ADJx, ADJ/x, or +xw are the same as NEAR, but matches must be in the same order. Example: (safety ADJ/5 belt) NEAR/10 (baby OR child) SAME vehicle.
Searching in title, abstract, claims, CPC: You can search inside a specific field using field names. Use TI=(safety belt) to search in the title, AB= for the abstract and CL= for the claims. For CPCs, CPC=B60R22 will match documents with exactly this CPC, CPC=B60R22/low matches documents with this CPC or a child classification of this CPC.
Wildcards, truncation: Although we automatically generate plurals, you can instead specify wildcard patterns of words to search. Wildcards only work on single words. The top 25 most common matches will be ORed together. Note: wildcards only work on English words. The wildcards are ? (zero or one character), * or $ (zero or more characters), $x (zero to x characters), and # (exactly one character). You can include more than one wildcard symbol per word. Examples: *saccharide? and hydroxy*phenyl*.
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