The purpose of this tutorial is to give users a hands-on, interactive patent application searching experience utilizing the United States Patent and Trademark Office's website.
This tutorial was brought to you by McKinney Engineering Library, The University of Texas Libraries.
If you want to narrow your search, you can use the field codes listed below the search box on the main Patent Application Full Text and Image Database advanced search page. To do this, precede your search term with the field code, followed by a forward slash (/). For example, say you wanted to search the abstracts of patents for the word "computer mouse." You would then type abst/ "computer mouse" into the query box and then click the Search button to bring up your hits.
Click on a patent application number to bring up a specific patent application. Focus on the Abstracts, Current U.S. class and subclass numbers, and the claims.
Finally, don't forget to look at the drawings. Click on the images button at the top of the page. (In order to view these images you will need a specialized TIFF viewer. Click on the help button at the top of the page and then click on the topic How to Access Patent Full-page Images to get complete instructions on downloading the free software.)
You may call 512-495-4511 or contact the Engineering Library for additional help using the patent files.
