Engineering Library

Finding Summaries and Full Text of Patents


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After you have the list of patent numbers which match your search, you may read summaries of patents in the Official Gazette of the U.S. Patent Office and read the full text of patents from our microfilm collection.

Reading Patent Summaries

Each week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office publishes its Official Gazette, which provides summaries of every patent issued that week. Summaries in the gazette appear in patent number order. Design patent summaries appear at the end of each weekly gazette.

For each patent number retrieved by your search, find the volume of the gazette which includes that number, and find the summary for that patent. Be aware that most of our bound (hardback) volumes of the gazette actually include two paperback issues; the number you are looking for may be in either the first or the second issue.

A typical gazette entry includes one of the drawings from the patent and one of the claims of the patent. It also includes patentee, class and subclasses, filing date (date of issue, is the date of the gazette in which the summary is printed), and the total number of claims that make up the full text of the patent.

Reading Full Text of Patents

The Engineering Library has copies of patents on microfilm, starting with Utility Patent #3,226,729 (1966), Design Patent #203,729 (1966), and Plant Patent #0001 (1938).

Microfilm readers and reader/printers are available in the 1st Floor Patent Search Area.

Full text patents include all of the drawings and all of the claims of the patent. Typical full text patents are several pages in length and contain enough information to create the patented item or process.

How to make/obtain printed copies of U.S. Patents
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Send them to the Engineering Library: englib@u.washington.edu
Last modified: Thursday September 23, 2004