Patents
a patent is a right granted by a government to an inventor for a limited time inventions become public domain after 20 years
to be patentable an invention must meet the following criteria: usefulness: it must have some practical utility novelty: it must never have been made public in any way non-obviousness: it must not be obvious
80% of world new information in chemistry is published in research articles or patents Source: Chemical Abstracts Service
source of original scientific information in the fields of applied sciences 70 90 % of the information in patents hasn t ever published anywhere (WIPO, 2002)
The American Chemical Society estimates that 46% of all new small molecules added to CAS Registry in 2010 were disclosedf first in patent application In 2010 about 22% of new patent applications were chemistry related
they are retrievable with bibliographic databases Reaxys Scopus They are retrievable with patent databases (free full text access) Unites States Patent and Trademark Office (US patents) Espacenet (European patents, WO patents)
Access: Portale AIRE > Trova risorse > USPTO Patent Database Espacenet Orbit Google Patents
Scientific search engines retrieve patents as well Google Patents https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts
GOOGLE PATENTS Scientific search engines retrieve patents as well Google Patents https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts
GOOGLE PATENTS it covers the collections of patents from the USPTO EPO WIPO US patent documents date back to 1790, EPO and WIPO to 1978
United States patents: US + number European patents: EP + number World Organization patents: WO + number FR, JP, GB, DE. + number they are written in the language of the country they are published
Burnett R. L. Ammonia synthesis catalysts. U.S. Patent 3,653,831, April 4, 1972. name of owner patent number name of patent date of issue
patents don t have an IMRD structure patents often are not so detailed as research articles their purpose is not to communicate a scientific research but the legal protection of an invention despite this, patents hold useful scientific information
PATENT STRUCTURE it can change depending on the countries abstract citations description / specifications claims drawings
PATENT FAMILY It s a set of patents that protect the same invention in different geographical regions so if you have retrieved a patent in a language that you don t know, it could be useful to search for its patent family
MARKUSH STRUCTURE patents often have claims made for a whole family of compounds. These are called Markush claims the inventor need not have tested or prepared all members of the family: just make a chemically plausible claim of equivalence.