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Lancaster Environment Centre: Standards and patents

A guide to Library resources for staff and students in LEC

What are standards?

A standard sets out a technical specification or other precise criteria to which manufacturers and service providers are required or recommended to conform. Laws or regulations may make it obligatory to comply with a particular standard.

The University subscribes to:

 

 

You can also find standards using the following sites:

  • ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) produces standards for telecommunications and computing.  They are free-of-charge

What are patents?

A patent protects a new invention by giving the inventor the right to prevent others from making, using or selling it without permission. A patent provides a detailed description of what an invention does, how it works and what it is made of. 

Patents can be an important source of information about very recent developments that have not yet been described in journal articles or conference papers.  They can also provide you with an overview of recent technical developments in an area.  The full text of a patent can often be found free-of-charge on the web.

Patents are not listed in many library databases, which focus on journal articles and conference papers. However the general database SCOPUS does include patents, as does SciFinder, which covers patents in Chemistry. The main specialist databases for patents are:

Esp@cenet is a worldwide network of patent databases. The availability of full text depends on individual countries. There is an excellent interactive tutorial on their website on finding and using patents.

Google Patent Search  provides comprehensive coverage of US patents. Many are available in full text as pdfs.

Lens.org is a worldwide Patent and Scholarly Search. Including a Patent Search from over 95 jurisdictions. It also includes over 200 million scholarly records, indexed from Microsoft Academic, Crossref and PubMed.  The free version is also enhanced with patent, scholarly works, and biological sequence analysis, allowing users to see where these have been cited in research.