The Patent Database from the U.S. Government is the only one of our databases that lists and describes patents. The business and engineering/computer science databases index journal articles discussing certain patents, but usually in reference to law suits.

The Patent Database does contain the full text of patents from 1976 to the present, but it does not provide very sophisticated searching capabilities. Its biggest limitation is its date searching.  It searches either by the date that the patent was issued (must be exact to the month, day, and year) or in a blanket search from 1976 onward. Hence, this example search yielded 50 results:

In the first field, we entered the company name "Sony" and changed the field type to "Assignee name." For our second term, we entered "semiconductors" and changed the field type to "Abstract," so that any patent that has "semiconductors" in its description would be found.

You will see that the results have been listed in patent number order. They cannot be rearranged by date or any other variable, and there is no feature whereby the database will automatically search by predetermined variables and then save or e-mail them on a periodic basis.