Full Text Data

Full Text data in the PATENTSCOPE® Search Service context means that the claims and descriptions as well as bibliographic data of PCT international applications, are made available in searchable text format.

The full text is obtained by applying automatic Optical Character Recognition procedures (OCR) to the scanned images of the documents. They therefore contain discrepancies with the originals and do not have a legal value. The texts are used to feed the PATENTSCOPE® Search Service text indexing engine and are provided, at no cost, as an additional service to the general public on PATENTSCOPE®.

The average accuracy of the texts of published international applications obtained from the PCT automatic OCR procedures is generally well above 98.5% (i.e. less than 40 errors for a page that contains 3000 characters). However, the accuracy may drop significantly for a small percentage of difficult documents published every week. This is usually due to bad paper originals before scanning or to pages with complex layouts, fonts or with words that cannot be found in dictionaries (often applications containing chemical or mathematical formulae with too small a font size).