Derwent Information Service

Much translated information on patents from many countries is issued by the Derwent Information Service of London who publish patents abstracting and report journals for the main industrial countries as well as many publications dealing with world patents in specific subject groups. 

Derwent Information Ltd. Derwent Information Ltd., previously known as Derwent PubHcations Ltd., changed its name in the 1990s to reflect more accurately the fact that its products go far beyond traditional pubHcations. Derwent provides a wide spectmm of information products and services, many of them relating to patents. Derwent also produces important databases (qv) of nonpatent information from the pharmaceutical and agncultural chemical Hterature. These products and services encompass alerting tools for current awareness, systems for retrospective search and retneval, and means for document deHvery and archiving. 

Derwent reaction databases are grouped under the Derwent Reaction Service, which offers a portfolio of reaction information products to meet the scientific documentation needs of the synthetic organic reaction chemist. 

EPIDOS issues printed and microfiche compilations of its data in addition, its database can be searched on its own computer or on several on-line host systems. In general, EPIDOS provides the most complete patent family information of any service, although Derwent tends to include more information on inteUectual (nonconvention) famUies, whereas the Erench Patent Office s EDOC file on the Questel system includes information on... 

There are a number of commercial sources of chemical information that are very detailed and encompassing, but generally available only at high cost to industrial users. These include the Chemical Abstracts Service (www.cas.org), Dialog (library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/ bl0304.html), Prous Science (www.prous.com), and Derwent (www.derwent.com) databases. In... 

The users of patent information have some major problems their companies expect them to be able to find information that will indicate the validity of a particular invention, any infringements on existing inventions, and potential licensing opportunities. With the breadth of information covered by patent documents today, it is easy to become mired in arguments of what is truly covered by a given disclosure. Derwent realises that if our service is to be valuable, we must provide all the information available in a patent to our users in an unambiguous way - they can then make a determination of the value of a particular document retrieved. 

These databases are generally obtainable from the various patent offices, or from specific suppliers such as the Derwent WPI or CAS MARPAT on STN. Other databases also contain information derived from patents (e.g., Beilstein is particularly good for patents before 1960), but the term patent database is used here to indicate the collection of data with the prime aim of providing a comprehensive service with respect to patent novelty, rather than a database of factual data in the sense of this article (although patent databases may well contain such information). 

Derwent provides an excellent supplement to the information given by Chemical Abstracts when discussing neighbor fields of chemistry, since Derwent provides all technology-related information since 1974/1975. A detailed index on IPC classes covered by CAS can be drawn from the manual Patent Information from Chemical Abstracts Service - Coverage and Content. 

Derwent not only contains the basic patent, like Chemical Abstracts do, but in addition patent families from the countries covered by Derwent (Fig. 131). Chemical Abstracts Service also contains patent families with the limitation that they are only accessable in the printed version (Sect. 2.1.3.6) but not in the database. Other databases offering information concerning patent families are INPADOC and EDOC (Questel). 

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