LibGuides: Engineering: Standards and patents

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:

British Standards Online This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
BSOL includes all British standards and international and European standards that have been adopted as British standards. It also includes ASTM, ISO and IEC standards that haven't been adopted as British standards. BSOL also holds BSI Publicly Available Specifications, as well as BSI books.
**New security feature for PDF downloads from 1 September 2021. See below for details.**
Downloading PDFs:
PDF downloads from BSOL incorporate a digital security feature. You are required to have FileOpen plug-in installed on your device to download and print all BSI documents. Adobe Acrobat or Reader is also required to view the documents on Windows and MacOS. Note that PDFs will not open in-browser - you must download and save the PDF to open it.

On University PCs, sign into Acrobat first, close it, then launch the FileOpen package from AppsAnywhere & follow the instructions.

If you encounter an error, check that your browser is set to download PDFs and open with Adobe, rather than open automatically in-browser.
IEEE Xplore Digital Library This link opens in a new window
IEEE Xplore Digital Library offers discovery and access to scientific and technical content published by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and its publishing partners.
Lancaster University subscribes to the following collections:
*IEEE/IET Electronic Library (IEL) - full text IEEE content published since 1988 with select content published since 1872 from IEEE journals, transactions, and magazines, including early access documents, IEEE conferences, IET journals, IET conferences, IEEE published standards, and IEEE Standards Dictionary Online.
*IEEE Standards Online - IEEE active, revised, archived, draft and redline versions
*Wake-up Radio
*Smart Grid Research
*MIT Press eBooks Library Computing and Engineering Collection - full text access to all MIT Press ebook titles copyrighted in the year(s) 2015-2018
*IEEE-Wiley eBooks Library - full text access to all IEEE-Wiley ebook titles copyrighted in the year(s) 1872 to 2018
*Bell Labs Technical Journal - abstract records and full text articles published from 1922
*IBM Journal of Research and Development - abstract records and select full text published since 1957
*VDE VERLAG Conferences - abstract records and select full text published since 2005
*Now Publishers Foundations and Trends Computer Science eBooks Collection 2018
*Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Computer & Information Science eBooks Collections 5-8
*Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Digital Library eBooks Collections 8
ASTM Compass This link opens in a new window
ASTM standards are used and accepted worldwide and cover areas such as metals, paints, plastics, textiles, petroleum, construction, energy, the environment, consumer products, medical services, devices and electronics, advanced materials and much more.

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.