Patent searches as a complement to literature searches in the life sciences—a 'how-to' tutorial

Patent literature is a valuable source of scientific information, and, while research published in journals is overproportionally cited in patents dealing with biotechnological and pharmaceutical inventions compared to the rest of the patent literature, the reverse is unfortunately not true.

A recent study concluded that only 0.25% of articles covering all biological sciences (referenced in the Science Citation Index from 1998) cite patents. An obvious reflection of this neglect is the lack of a specific reference style format for patents in the instructions for authors of most biomedical journals, presumably because only few people ever ask for it.

While this ignorance of patents as an information source might be considered to be a bigger problem in engineering and material sciences, a recent comment in Nature pointed out that some patents contain more detailed information than the corresponding scientific papers (in this case it was about stem cell technology).

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