Search for Patents or Patent Applications

Searches the U.S. Pre-Grant Publications (US-PGPUB), Patents (USPAT), and/or Optical Character Recognition (USOCR) databases. See the web app for an interactive search.

uspto_search(query, databases = c("US-PGPUB", "USPAT", "USOCR"),
  outFile = NULL, start = 0, limit = FALSE, sort = "date_publ desc",
  english_only = TRUE, spellCheck = FALSE, plurals = TRUE,
  britishEquivalents = TRUE, verbose = FALSE)

Arguments

query: A query string; for example "noodle", "photographic AND noodle", "wet adj4 silicon", or "G01W.CPCL.". See the Patent Public Search training materials.
databases: A character vector specifying which databases to search in; a selection from c("US-PGPUB", "USPAT", "USOCR").
outFile: Name of a .csv file to save results to. If this file exists, it will be loaded instead of searching.
start: Result of the search to start from.
limit: Maximum number of results to return; defaults to all results.
sort: How to sort results; defaults to publication date ("date_publ desc").
english_only: Logical; if FALSE, will return patent and/or applications of any language.
spellCheck: Logical; if TRUE, will spellcheck query terms.
plurals: Logical; if TRUE, will look for plural and singular forms of query terms.
britishEquivalents: Logical; if TRUE, will look for British and American forms of query terms.
verbose: Logical; if FALSE, does not print status messages.

Value

A data.frame of results, if any were found; otherwise NULL.

Examples

if (FALSE) {
# search for applications with a meteorology classification:
# https://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/cpc/html/cpc-G01W.html
results <- uspto_search("G01W.CPCL.", "US-PGPUB")

# search by date and keyword:
results <- uspto_search("20020801.pd. AND motorcycle")
}