For a research project, I need to download full-text (title, abstract, description, claims), date, and citations, for patents published in a given period (say from 2010 on) and in a given class. The text must be easy to use (i.e. no pdfs). I'm looking for something free for research. So far, I have found the full texts published weekly by the USPTO and the PatentsView web search and API. However, in the first case data need to be downloaded manually for each week (I have not found a way to download multiple files at once) and in the second case I should be able to obtain the text and abstract, but not the claim and the description. Do you have any tool to recommend or a way to solve the problems with the ones above?
3 Answers
You should take a look at patent_client! It's a python module that searches the live USPTO and EPO databases using a Django-style API. The results from any query can then be cast into pandas DataFrames or Series with a simple .to_pandas() call.
from patent_client import USApplication, Inpadoc, Patent, PublishedApplication
# USPTO databases
Patent.objects.filter("filter criteria here")
PublishedApplication.objects.filter("filter criteria here")
# EPO databases
Inpadoc.objects.filter("filter criteria here")
Each of the sources has a number of filtering criteria to get what you need, and you can then iterate over the results, getting the fulltext information. For convienence, that data is located at:
Patent.description
Patent.claim_text
Patent.abstract
PublishedApplication.description
PublishedApplication.claim_text
PublishedApplication.abstract
Inpadoc.description
Inpadoc.claims.claims_text
Inpadoc.abstract
A great place to start is the User Guide Introduction
(Full disclosure - I'm the author and maintainer of patent_client)
I'm not sure it does exactly what you want, but I'd recommend looking at The Lens. It can definitely display full text in the browser window and has different download options. They are working on an API so you could ask them about that. The Lens is free and non-commercial.
Update:
The Lens now seems to provide an API for patent data. I've not used it, but the following quote is from the site.
Introducing the Lens Patent API v1.0
We are pleased to introduce version 1.0 of the new patent API, providing access to the global corpus of Lens patent records using the flexibility and convenience of a REST API.
The API is built on a new patent information architecture to implement the Lens MetaRecord concept and accommodate additional data sources and fields that will be expanded in subsequent releases, providing access to comprehensive patent metadata. The versioned API allows you to combine and perform several search operations to programmatically retrieve results. Scaling from the current 45 search fields to 120+ search fields in this patent API, The Lens seeks to provide more flexibility in the way patent data can be used.
I do not know under what terms there is to get access to the API. More information is available on the website.
The Lens is great. You may also see EPO's Espacenet. The results can be exported in CSV.
