Muscat – Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion (MoCIIP) advises inventors to check novelty before starting the patent application process by asking whether an idea is truly new.

To conduct an effective search, applicants can use keywords, technical terms, inventors’ names, and patent classifications, then compare these results with the solution or innovation offered by their own idea.

To assist with this process, 5 free tools are available for searching existing databases. These include PATENTSCOPE for international patent applications, Espacenet for advanced searches and patent families, Google Patents for quick global searches, USPTO Patent Public Search for United States patents, and Google Scholar to find scholarly articles and related technological research.