Patent coverage by abstracting services. 4. Coverage of microbiological patents.
The paper reports a study on the coverage by seven major abstracting services in the field of microbiology in regard to patents. Only three of the services--Chemical Abstracts, Microbiology Abstracts, Section A, and Food Science and Technology Abstracts--cover patents at all. We assessed the three services in terms of the information they provide about patents and then in terms of their performance in retrieving patents taken from a master list of patents on genetic engineering and Vitamin D, obtained by searches on World Patents Index. Timeliness of the three services was also assessed. We found that none of the standard abstracting services in the field cover patents satisfactorily and they are slow in picking up patents. The research demonstrates that by scanning just Japanese, Soviet, U.S., and British patents, both timely and comprehensive coverage of the microbiological patent literature can be obtained.
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D007255:Information Services; D008829:Microbiology; D010330:Patents as Topic