Ibero-American patent information with Latipat: public search systems and their differences

Abstract

The Latipat project unifies patent information from 20 Ibero-American countries making this content available and free of cost via several major public patent search systems: namely Espacenet, Patentscope and Invenes. These different accesses are presented and their data coverage is analysed. A comparison showed that, although the patent information comes from the same origin, the country coverage and actuality of the patent information varies substantially in the three compared search systems. Regarding the technology coverage, an exemplary search for nanotechnology patents revealed different results depending on the keyword and classification support of each search system.