Oxford LibGuides: Patent Information: Research databases

Patents in research databases

Research databases provide bibliographic references of published patents. Information about patents in research databases is subject-specific.
The following databases include patents from selected sources, and they vary in coverage.

Reaxys
Reaxys Academic Edition (RAE) has extensive coverage of quality, authoritative information in chemistry, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology data.

• It covers organic, inorganic and organometallic chemistry dating as far back as 1771.
• It includes over 179 million organic, inorganic and organometallic substances, 57 million chemical reactions, over 86 million documents from over 16 000 chemistry-related periodicals, and 500M searchable experimental properties including substance property, spectral and reaction data. It indexes over 35 million patents from 105 patent offices with abstracts and claims translated into English.
• It is the world’s largest medicinal chemistry database with over 43 million bioactivity data points, 34+ million unique substances with bioactivity, 32,000+ unique targets, and 54,000+ species.
• It provides fast access to published synthesis routes and augments knowledge with robust predicted routes by applying AI.

Reaxys Academic Edition (RAE) comprises three modules: Reaxys, Reaxys Medicinal Chemistry and Reaxys Predictive Retrosynthesis.
SciFinder
This resource requires you to register before use.
Alternative name: Sci Finder Scholar

SciFinder on the Web is a research discovery tool that allows you to explore the world’s literature in Chemistry and related scientific disciplines including biochemistry, biomedical sciences, chemical engineering, materials science, pharmacology, agriculture, etc. The CAS information service indexes and abstracts information from more than 10000 major scientific journals, 57 patent authorities around the world, conference proceedings, technical reports, etc and produces the following databases:
CAplus (Scientific Literature and Patents)
CAS REGISTRY (Chemical Substances)
CASREACT (Reactions)
CHEMCATS (Chemical Catalogs)
CHEMLIST (Regulated Chemicals)
MARPAT (Markush Structures)
Scopus
Scopus is a bibliographic database for science, medicine and some social sciences. It covers over 25,000 journals and over 300,000 books from over 7,000 publishers worldwide, providing access to over 90 million records going back as far as the 18th century.
It includes the content from a number of other major databases: Medline (medicine) 1966 - , Embase (medicine) 1970 - , Compendex (engineering) 1970 - , Geobase (geography) 1980 - .
Web of Science Core Collection
Alternative names: WOS ; Web of Knowledge ; WoK. Web of Science provides seamless access to the Science Citation Expanded®, Social Sciences Citation Index®, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index™.

Derwent World Patent Index (access from Web of Science platform)
DWPI is a source of patent information. It provides enhanced titles and comprehensive abstracts of patents from more than 50 patent authorities

To obtain full-text patents, search patent office databases.

Disclaimer: We do not take responsibility for the content on external web sites.

Related subject guides

Patent classification

Patents in full (original documents) are available from national patent offices or from patent databases such as Espacenet.
You can search for patents using:

Keyword(s)
Patent number
Classification code

Classification schemes are used to group patents by type of technical information:

IPC (WIPO) - International classification
CPC - Cooperative Patent Classification (extended IPC)
UKC - UK classification (before 2007)
Other (USPTO, JPO)