Patent Knowledge Snippets

Another milestone reached – more than 150 million documents accessible through Espacenet 

The EPO's collection of worldwide patent data is available to the public, and an excellent way to access this wealth of information free of charge is through Espacenet.  

We recently reached another milestone by passing the 150 million documents mark. This reflects the number of data sets that are searchable and accessible through Espacenet. If you want to know more about how the data is composed, you can explore the different coverage tables that tell you, for example, how many bibliographic or full-text "documents" there are, which IP offices they come from, what kind codes they use and when the latest document was added. 

Fig. 1: Example of available patent documents published by the European Patent Office as seen in the bibliographic coverage table. 

Surprised to see a new "kind code" (the letter C) for EP publications? Well, this is the so-called C0 marker, which identifies European patents with a unitary effect. As you can see in the screenshot above, it appeared in the data in June 2023 when the Unitary Patent System entered into force. You can discover more about Unitary Patents on our dedicated webpage for patent information tools and services. 

Tip: You can easily learn how to use Espacenet through its help files, the compact pocket guide or the collection of short video clips, so-called Patent Knowledge Nuggets. 

Keywords: Espacenet, patent data, coverage, Patent Knowledge Nuggets, Unitary Patent