By Donald Zuhn —

On April 25th, the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of China announced the launch of an online patent database that allows for English language searches of the bibliographic data and abstracts of published Chinese patent documents.  In particular, the database permits one to search the following fields of invention and/or utility model patent publications:  publication number, publication date, application number, application date, title, abstract, IPC, applicant, inventor, patent agent, patent agency code, priority, and province/country code, or alternatively, to do combination searches on multiple fields.  The new database can be accessed here.  In its announcement, SIPO indicated that the new database was being launched with the intent of collecting user feedback, which the Office noted would be crucial for further improvement of the database.