If you are in the process of innovation and you would like to know what already exists in your technical space, or if you would like to do some preliminary prior art searching before contacting us, below are some useful links to databases that are free to use for searching patent literature and non-patent literature.  Good luck!  



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Patent Search Databases

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (Issued and Published Applications: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/index.html
World Intellectual Property Organization: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/search.jsf
Free searchable patent databaseshttp://www.google.com/patents
European Patent Office: http://www.epo.org/searching.html and http://worldwide.espacenet.com

Non-Patent Literature Search Databases

Google: http://scholar.google.com/
PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
PubChem for chemical structure searches: http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
BLAST: http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
ATCC: http://www.atcc.org
ScienceDirect (not-always-free): ​http://www.sciencedirect.com









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