Research Guides: ENGT Capstone Research Guide: Survey of Competing Products / Review State of the Art

Writing a Literature Review

The Literature Review: A Research Journey
A Harvard University guide to conducting and writing a literature review. Includes tutorials on synthesizing the literature.
Engineering:the Literature Review Process
An Arizona State University guide with resources on conducting literature reviews. See the "Using a Literature Matrix" box for resources helpful for synthesizing the literature you've found.

Patents

What is a Patent? (from: Purdue Libraries Patent Guide)

"A patent is a property right granted by a government agency (in the United States, it's the US Patent & Trademark Office) for a novel, useful, and non-obvious invention. Patent protection lasts twenty years from the filing date and allows the inventor or their assignee to exclude other people from making, using, selling, or importing an invention."

Patent literature is a rich source of information for engineering design.

Patents searches are often conducted for one of three reasons:

to locate detailed technical information not available elsewhere;
for patentability purposes, to start to determine if an invention is "novel" by assessing whether it is covered by an existing patent;
to determine the "state of the art" in a given area of technology -- get design inspiration!

Effective patent searching involves more than using keywords.
Save time and maximize your success by completing this module:

Public & Free Sources

Lens Free, user-friendly, open access resource for world wide patent research. Years of coverage vary by country.
Espacenet Worldwide patent search provided by the European Patent Office (EPO). Years of coverage dependent on country.
Google Patents Perform a quick search for patents (not comprehensive - if a patent is located through this search engine it is recommended you search the patent number through the USPTO or Epacenet to ensure you have the most up-to-date version.)
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Official database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Full text searching from 1976-present, limited searching back to 1790.

Patents Databases (Purdue users only):

Derwent Innovations Index Value-added patent information from Derwent World Patent Index as well as patent citation information from Patents Citation Index®.

More Resources Available:

Purdue Libraries Patent Guide

Google - Advanced Search Techniques

Make the most out of your Google searches!

Search operators are words that can be added to searches to help narrow down the results. Don’t worry about memorizing every operator, because you can also use the Advanced Search page to create these searches.

Operator	How to use it
`site:`	Get results from certain sites or domains. Examples: `olympics site:nbc.com` and `olympics site:.gov`
`related:`	Find sites that are similar to a web address you already know. Example: `related:time.com`
`OR`	Find pages that might use one of several words. Example: `marathon OR race`
`info:`	Get information about a web address, including the cached version of the page, similar pages, and pages that link to the site. Example: `info:google.com`
`cache:`	See what a page looks like the last time Google visited the site. Example: `cache:washington.edu`

Note: When you search using operators or punctuation marks, don't add any spaces between the operator and your search terms. A search for site:nytimes.com will work, but site: nytimes.com won't.

(Information on this page from: Google Search Help - Search Operators)