An Overview of Scholarly Databases with Patent Inclusion

P atents are one of the most important types of scientific and technological products that contain valuable information about invention, inventor or co-inventors, assignee, classification (IPC, CPC or ...), etc. This kind of information is often not published in journals and other information sources. There are databases dedicated to patents that collect patent information. Access to some of them, such as USPTO and WIPO database is free and others, such as the Derwent database, require subscription. In recent years, some scholarly and citations databases, usually dedicated to providing data on scientific works such as articles, books, etc., have also covered patents. These databases are available for free and subscription and can provide sophisticated search tools which allow simple search, advanced search, semantic search or patent number search, name of materials and chemical compounds and other search methods to obtain the required information from patents. Using advanced tools, it is possible to visualize and analyze patents to understand the development path of certain technologies. In this article, the most important databases providing patent information are introduced. These databases include lenz, Orbit, chemical abstracts service (SciFinder and PatentPAK), etc.