Petroleum Patent searching

McCulloch, T. B., Patent Searching in Petroleum Refining Operations, presented at a meet-... 

Databases that index patents include Petroleum Abstracts and SciFinder. Please see Chapter 2, General Engineering Resources, in this book for a full list of patent searching resources. 

APIPAT. This is the patent database produced by the American Petroleum Institute and covers patents from 1964 of interest to the petrochemical industry, including petroleum refining, pollution control, uses of petrochemicals, and catalysts. Enhanced indexing includes terms applied from a hierarchical thesaurus with automatic posting to the broader terms in the hierarchy. Fragments called chemical aspects are linked to describe each compound, and the compounds are further linked to roles (eg, reactant or product) and use (eg, antioxidant or lubricant). ORBIT provides access to a merged APIPAT/WPI file, which allows searchers to draw on the strengths of both databases without the need to search them separately (95). 

This paper presents a description of the techniques employed by the technical libraries of The Texas Co. in making extensive patent and literature surveys as a background and basis for laboratory research. These techniques are fundamentally applicable for most chemical and petroleum searches. 

A few of the most important U. S. patent classes and subclasses for obtaining information on sulfur compounds obtainable from petroleum are listed below. All those patent subclasses which would yield references to desulfurization have been omitted in view of the excellent coverage of patent abstracts on this subject given in Rakoff s bibliography (201). References to the sulfur compounds themselves may be found by searching many of the patent classes such as 196 for mineral oils, 202 for distillation processes, 183 for gas separations, 210 for liquid separations, and 260 for organic carbon compounds. In this last class are hsted the most important references to the sulfur compounds and for that reason there is included below a selected list of those subclasses which may contain pertinent information on sulfur compounds. 

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