PatBasics: An Introduction to PatBase

PatBasics - Tools

Tools in PatBase





  • Citation Explorer simplifies the task of examining voluminous patent citations. Access the Citation Explorer from the right-hand side of the family bar in the “View”, “Browse” or “Hits” screens when viewing results. Once in Citation Explorer you can switch between different tabs, with the option to:

    • Compare documents in side-by-side view
    • Visualise forward and backward citations in the Citation Tree
    • View graphs showing citations by date, or separated into forward or backward citations
    • Access a timeline showing when backward and forward citations have been published
  • Access the Legal Status module from the right-hand side of the family bar in the “View”, “Browse” or “Hits” screens when viewing your results. Select “Status”. Once in the Legal Information Browser, users can select one of the following tabs: Timeline, Table, Reassignments, Priority map and Litigation.
  • The PatBase Thesaurus can be accessed through the “Search” menu or on the right-hand side of the “History” page in the Information Tab under “Search Tools”. The Thesaurus is split into 4 categories: General terms, Gene & proteins, Chemical terms and Language.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I search for specific citations in PatBase from a Citation Explorer session?
Citation Explorer makes it simple and easy to run a search on the citations marked against your reference family.

Within the left-hand scroll table in your Citation Explorer session you will see 3 drop-down sections.

The black section titled “family members” contains all documents held within the family upon which the Citation Explorer session was run:


The second and third sections, in red and blue and titled “Backwards” and “Forwards” respectively, cover the citations that are listed against the currently viewed family.

(NB: a newer family may not contain forwards citations data if no documents currently in the database are marked as having cited the currently viewed family.)
(NB: newer families may not contain forwards citation data as they might not have been cited yet)

to view one or more of the backwards or forwards citations in PatBase, click the downward arrow to open up the relevant drop-down:


Check the documents of interest using the tick-boxes provided.

Once you have made your selection, click the PatBase icon as shown below, to run a PatBase search on your selection.


(Please note: it is not currently possible to search both forwards and backwards citations simultaneously. Instead follow the steps above for the backwards citations and then repeat for the forwards citations to receive two search lines, one for each search. These can be combined using Boolean operators)
How do I share legal status information with a colleague via the Legal Information Browser?
In this example we will be sharing the legal status timeline for a family, however this process will work with the table, reassignment and priority map views as well.

First open the Legal Information Browser for the family of interest, and navigate to the screen you wish to share:



Next click the additional options symbol as shown in the screenshot below to access a dropdown list of the various formats in which you can export the date in the current view.



The file formats available will change depending on the data being viewed: for example the excel file format is available as an option when viewing the legal status table information but not when viewing the timeline.

You also have the option with all views to either generate a link which you can host yourself or send directly to a colleague or an email option which will open a new email message and automatically populate it with a link and a short message: