Japanese Prior Art Search Resources

• PATOLIS
  One of the major Japanese commercial patent databases providing patent, utility model, design, and trade mark, file wrapper/file history information in Japanese only. We often use this database in our patent class search.



• NRI
  Another very important major Japanese commercial databases providing patent, utility model, design, and trade mark, file wrapper/file history information in Japanese only. We often use this database in our patent full text search.



• NEF-NET
  This is a commercial online Japanese search engine providing information on published Japanese patent and utility model documents published after 1993.



• JPDS
  A paid online Japanese patent database providing Japanese intellectual property information about Japanese patents, utility models, designs, and trademarks



• IPDL
  IPDL stands for Industrial Property Digital Library. This is a free database provided by Japanese Patent Office (JPO). Although search function is not as powerful as commercial databases, this is still a very useful patent search engine in preliminary searches to check search strategies and search strings/formula, also for Japanese patent number search.



• GetIPDL
  This is a patent download tool for downloading patents from patent offices.

• JDream-II
  This is a non-patent literature search engine provided by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). JDream-II is actually a bundle of Japanese non-patent literature search engines consisting of a few databases. Two of the most important databases in this bundle are JSTPlus, which is the largest commercial Japanese non-patent scientific literature database in the world, and JMEDPlus, which is the largest commercial Japanese non-patent medical/pharmaceutical literature databases in the world.



• Medical Online
  Paid online Japanese medical and pharmaceutical related literature provider. Stored literatures not as broad as JMEDPlus but can get PDF online although expensive ($15-18).



• JST copy
  JST's non-patent literature copying service provider. Cost for getting one copy of non-patent literature including copyright fee and labour cost both payable to JST is $12-15 on average depending on the length of the literature.



• G-search
  Largest paid online Japanese business information database bundle providing news papers, magazines, books, company information search.



• Other Japanese non-patent literature databases
  We also use a few other supplemental databases including J-Global, READ, NINii, GENii, Kaken, etc.

After locating prior art in Japanese, Chinese or Korean, our experienced and qualified professional patent translators can translate these documents into English. Or if you need to have a quick read at these documents to know what is been said in these documents without spending human translation cost, we can use computer to perform machine translation for you.

We also have access to Chinese and Korean databases, both patent and non-patent literatures. Contact us now to learn how we can help your litigation strategy or licensing by locating relevant reference documents for you.