InfoGuides: Chemistry & Biochemistry: Find Drawing Software & Patents

Drawing Software

ACD/ChemSketch Freeware
ACD/ChemSketch Freeware is a free comprehensive chemical drawing package that allows you to draw chemical structures including organics, organometallics, polymers, and Markush structures.
CAS Structure Editor (SciFinder-n)
SciFinder-n® is integrated with the CAS Structure Editor that enables you to create or edit structures. You can use these structures as the basis for your structure and reaction searches.
ChemAxon MarvinSketch (Reaxys)
Reaxys uses ChemAxon MarvinSketch, a standard java-based structure editor that does not require any installation, as its default structure editor.

Patent Country Codes

How do you identify world patents or patent applications? Below is a list of standardized patent kind and country codes to help in your research.

Kind Code and Country Codes for Patents covered in SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts)
CAS has covered patents of chemical, biochemical, and chemical engineering interest from 1907 to the present. This table is a list of patent kind codes for the CA basic patents and patent family members for the countries covered by CAS.

Patent Websites

Patents are valuable resources when researching through the chemical literature. Patent literature is included often in science, engineering and business databases and can appear in your reference lists. These are sites through which you can obtain full-text copies of US and world patents.

Google Patents
Excellent site for copies of US Patents - can be downloaded in PDF format.
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
Full-text of US patents and patent applications. Additional information regarding the patents and USPTO can be found at http://www.uspto.gov/
European Patent Office
The EPO patent database contains patents and patent applications from countries in Europe. For example if you are looking for a patent beginning with EP or DE you might want to use this service. Patents are downloadable in PDF format.
Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) Patents Database
This database lets you access over 75 years of patent descriptions and images from Canada. You can search, retrieve and study more than 1,900,000 patent documents.
Japan Patent Office (JPO) Patent Database
Search the PAJ database for abstracts of Japanese patents.
World Intellectual Patent Office (WIPO) Patentscope
enables you to do full-text search in over 1.4 million published international patent applications from the first publication in 1978.
Free Patents Online
The FreePatentsOnline search engine is one of the most powerful, fastest and easiest patent search engines on the web. All documents are available in a highly-compressed PDF format.
German Patent and Trademark Office (GPTO)
DEPATISnet is the free electronic patent document archive of the GPTO. Search for patents under publication number (and other fields) using the examples set by the GPTO. PDF's of the full documents are available by clicking on "Load full document".