Chemical Information on the Internet

The database is produced by the European Patent Office and is provided by the host FIZ Karlsruhe (Germany). 

The World Patent Index of Derwent Information Ltd. is a broad collection of international value-added patent documents from 40 patent-issuing authorities. The bibliographic database contains 11.6 million patent records with 5.5 million images (October, 2002) and grows by 1.5 million patent documents each year. The classified and indexed documents (since 1963) are sometimes provided wdth additional abstracts or significant titles. 

Scientific, and especially chemical, information is becoming increasingly available on the Internet. This has the advantage that the information is accessible to other users. Additionally, the data formats (HTML, PDF, GIF, etc.) that are used are restricted to the most important ones to provide standards that are readable worldwide. Unfortunately, however, much of the information on the Internet is not reviewed or verified by other organizations as is the case in the primary literature. Thus, the quality of the information is extremely variable. 

Altogether, the Internet provides the following types of sdentific information  

The huge number of websites on the Internet (about 2,5 billion web pages December, 2002) containing chemical information is a great challenge when one is attempting to find specific information on a topic. Therefore numerous search engines have been developed and offered that provide fast access to the data. 

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