Reading a Patent Search Report

A patent search report can be daunting, to say the least.  You may not have much experience with patents, so the references in the report may be difficult to digest.  It doesn’t help that patents, even older ones, are written with a lot of jargon. Here are some tips to make the job easier.

Look a the cover pages.  On the cover pages of all newer patents, you get the bibliographic information These two parts will very often give you most of the information you need to understand the patent. You can often make a fast yes/no decision on a patent just based on what’s on the cover page.

Keep these questions in mind:

• What similarities does my invention have to these references?
• Are there shortcomings in the references?  Where is there potential for improvement?
• Does my invention improve on what’s here?