Espacenet 1.6.1 release notes -
November 2019

New Espacenet

Espacenet is an EPO database containing over 110 million patent documents - full technical descriptions and drawings of inventions - from over 100 countries.

New Espacenet is a complete overhaul of classic Espacenet, offering you

• a new, smooth user experience from search to results
• the possibility of searching in all data, including full text, by default
• improved result list handling and inspection
• intuitive and easy query building
• filtering and statistical analyses of results
• help at source
• responsive design.

These release notes provide an overview of the features and changes compared to classic Espacenet.

User experience and features

Landing page

• Clean landing page
• Smart search at the top
• A new way to select a patent authority's user interface in any language offered by that authority

Smart search

• Query visible at the top of the page at all times and readily accessible for further refinement
• A greater number of searchable fields (see Annex 1)

Result list

• State-of-the-art automatic ranking by relevance in different views, including drawings (i.e. text only, text and thumbnails, compact list, drawings only)
• Drawings can be enlarged by hovering over them

Detail view

• Result list and document details visible side by side
• Drawings displayed together with bibliographic data, description and claims
• Drawings and original documents can be opened in separate pop-up windows
• Sorting of citations, legal events and families according to various criteria
• Latest legal events table for all INPADOC family members

Advanced search

• Advanced search always synchronised with Smart search
• Dynamic search building
• add fields
• select search field
  • broad category (e.g. Text fields, Names, Classifications) or
  • specific field (e.g. Applicants, Claims, CPC)
• use → Group to create brackets for nested queries
• use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) between search fields, or comparison and proximity operators (Any, All, Proximity, =) between terms in a field
• Full Advanced search template, i.e. query builder, can be displayed before a search is started or by resetting the search
• Graphical representation of the whole query

Filters

• Filter criteria to narrow down results
• Apply or Exclude function
• Statistical analyses, including graphical representations, of main applicants/inventors, countries, languages, dates, classification codes and applicant/inventors' country of residence

 My Espacenet area for

• Saving patents of interest
• Re-running previous queries
• Changing settings related to history / saved lists

Download

• Improved layout of the result list exported into Excel
• Statistical filter analyses

Help

• Tooltips: short messages about user interaction with Espacenet. Activated by hovering the mouse over some elements of the user interface
•  Popup tips: context-specific help or definitions for specific items in the interface. Can be activated or deactivated
• Glossary: a guide to terminology used in patent information

Responsive design

For optimal user experience, new Espacenet adapts the layout to different devices (large screens, laptops, tables and smartphones).

Feedback

See this forum entry for a list of known issues and workarounds.

We will continue to collect your feedback via a standardised questionnaire. Simply follow the link in the main navigation bar.

We will not be able to comment on your feedback. Should you have any questions requiring a direct response from us, please post them on the forum.

Reporting data errors

Please report data errors relating to the document displayed in the detail view from the link in the main navigation bar.

Annex 1: Searchable fields in new Espacenet

¹ You can search by the publication date of the earliest publication (e.g. EPA1) of a patent document but not by the publication dates of subsequent publications (e.g. EPB1). This is because subsequent publication dates are not indexed for search purposes.