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Quickhelp questions

Quickhelp answers

What is meant by high quality text as facsimile?

As an alternative to the patent translate tool, you can access the high quality translation of the description of a suitable family member by clicking on the document number.

What does A1, A2, A3 and B stand for after a European publication number?

When a European patent application is published together with the search report, it is known as an A1 publication. When this application is published without the search report, it is an A2 document. The search report is then published later as an A3 document. When the patent is granted, it is published as a B document.

What happens if I click on "In my patents list"?

Clicking on "In my patents list" adds the document to your "My patents list". The star appears in red as soon as the document is in the list. You can store up to 100 documents in this list. The list expires after one year of non-use. This period resets automatically each time you modify the list.

What happens if I click on the "Register" button?

If you click on the "Register" link (where activated) for a particular country this takes you straight to the corresponding entry in the national register concerned. For EP and Euro-PCT documents, clicking on the "EP Register" button allows you to view all the information pertaining to the patent application concerned, from first publication through to grant and beyond (legal status data, patent family details, etc.) in the European Patent Register.

Why are some sidebar options deactivated for certain documents?

Although the Espacenet database is continually being expanded to include additional countries and provide more extensive coverage, we do not have all items of data for all documents. For example, we may have the bibliographic data for a particular document, but not the full text or the images of the document. In this case, the sidebar options normally used for accessing the missing data are deactivated. They are re-activated when the content becomes available.

How can I bookmark this page?

Simply right-click on the page bookmark link and select "Add to Favorites/Bookmarks" from the context menu.

Why does a list of documents with the heading "Also published as" sometimes appear, and what are these documents?

A single invention can be the subject of a patent application in many different countries. In Espacenet, these related applications are known as "corresponding documents" or "equivalents". It is these that are listed under the "Also published as" heading.

Why do I sometimes find the abstract of a corresponding document?

Espacenet aims to have an English-language abstract available for each set of corresponding patents (also known as "equivalents"). When a document retrieved during a search does not have an English-language abstract, but there is one available for a corresponding document, the latter is displayed.

What happens if I click on the red "patent translate" button?

This feature provides machine translations of English abstracts into one of the supported languages, and of non-English texts into English. The text for translation is sent to specially "trained" machine translation engines, jointly developed by the EPO and Google, where it is processed and returned to the user.

What is Global Dossier?

Global Dossier gives you access to the file content of numerous intellectual property offices (including the IP5 offices). For more information please refer to our Help section on Global Dossier.