Reference corpus
Patents, read from the offices that grant them
Granted patents and published applications from more than a hundred patent offices — searchable by what an invention does, not just the words in its title.
- 16
- offices
- 1
- source
- 2025
- covered
What’s in it right now
Read directly from the patent offices' own published data, so a record says what the office says. English titles and abstracts, with the full specification available for the documents that publish one.
Counted across the whole collection, over the records that declare it.
What one record carries
- Publication office
- Filing and grant dates
- Applicant and inventor
- Classification
- Abstract and claims
Every record also keeps the address it was read from, so any answer built on it can be followed back to the original.
What you can do with it
Four things this collection is kept for, and the questions behind them.
Search by what it does
Describe the invention in your own words and find the filings that match, even when they use completely different terminology.
See the landscape
Who is filing, in which offices, and how a field has moved year on year.
Follow it into the record
Every result links back to the office's own publication, so a claim can be checked at source.
Read alongside the research
Patents sit next to the academic corpus, so an invention and the papers behind it turn up in the same search.
The kind of question it is filed to answer.
Patent language is written to be broad rather than searchable, and two filings for the same idea rarely share a word. Reading the abstract and claims is what makes a plain description enough to find them.
And what comes back
- Filings that match a descriptionFound on what the invention does, not on the words its drafter happened to choose.
- A set you can groupBy office, by applicant or by year, so a field can be read as a landscape rather than one document at a time.
- A link into the registerEvery result points back at the office's own publication, so a claim can be checked at source.
- 01Which companies filed on solid-state batteries in Japan last year?
- 02Has anyone already filed on the mechanism I am about to describe?
- 03How has filing activity in this field moved over the last decade, and in which offices?
- 04Which filings name this applicant as the inventor rather than the assignee?
Examples of what this collection is built to answer, not saved searches or results. What comes back depends on what has been read so far.
What it is not good for
known limits- It is not a freedom-to-operate opinion. A search is where clearance starts; whether a claim reads on your product is a legal judgement.
- Filings publish on a delay set by the office, so the most recent months of activity in any field are necessarily incomplete.
Where it is used
Research reads this shelf.
The research workspace reads patents alongside papers, standards and datasets, with citations that link back to the original filing.
Describe the invention
In your own words. The terminology a drafter used is exactly what you do not have.
Read the claims, not the title
Titles are deliberately uninformative; the claims are where the scope actually is.
Set it beside the papers
The research workspace reads patents alongside papers, standards and datasets, with citations that link back to the original filing.
Read, filed and kept current.
This collection is one shelf of the askFinz index — material read from the source and filed as the kind of thing it is, rather than as undifferentiated web pages. The counts above are read from the running system.