Here are some basic things you need to know before using Espacenet
Patents are legal titles protecting inventions. They offer a temporary private right to the holder of the invention who can prevent others from using his patented invention.
Such an exclusive position is often necessary to recoup the R&D investments that where necessary to develop the invention. The patent system therefore promotes innovation by financially rewarding inventors.
As any exclusive ownership rights, patents must be accessible to the public if the owner wants to exert his right. Today, patents are usually published and accessible through electronic means.
In several technical fields, Patents are the most efficient source of information for the following reasons.
Do not expect to cover the whole state-of-the-art by searching in national Patents only.
Databases available on Espacenet have also some limitations in the number and the quality of fields accessible that should be considered when drawing conclusions from the result of a search.
Commercial patent databases usually offer extra value, by the number of fields you can access, and due to the content of the abstract that has been rewritten to facilitate easieraccess to the document by keyword searches.
To sum up, a patent database user should always be aware of the content of the database he is using and know the limitations of the fields.
Patents are classified according to various classification schemes covering all possible technical domains. When conducting a search, it is essential to systematically use this tool that offers an objective criteria to access relevant documents. Keywords are much more subjective as there are many words to describe a same concept.