Getting the Most Out of SciFinder

Patents

Updated daily, SciFinder-n allows access to patents published by 109 issuing authorities and more than 40,000 unique IPC codes in various fields of science, including pharmaceuticals, engineering, chemistry, and more. Patents come in more than 50 languages, and a selection of them have been translated into English by CAS.

PatentPak, a patent information analysis tool in SciFinder-n, provides access to about 18 million patents from 46 patent offices, including patents from China, the European Patent Office, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and more.

The above numbers as are of May 2025. For more up-to-date numbers, please check here.

• To start a Markush search, select the Substances tab in the search bar on the home page of SciFinder.
• After doing so, use CAS Draw to draw the Markush structure you are looking to search.
  • This structure can be the exact structure or a substructure.
  • For more information on CAS Draw, please click here to see the portion of the guide that covers CAS Draw.
• Once your structure is drawn, select the "Search Patent Markush" option beneath your drawing. After, conduct your search.
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• Once you conduct a search, Markush results will be shown to you As Drawn by default. To get results for your substance as a substructure instead, select the "Substructure" option at the left of the screen.
• You can also use filters to cut down on the returned number of substance if desired.
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• You can view the references associated with your results by clicking the References button.
  • Note that you can view references for all of your results in your set, or view the references only for results selected by checking their checkbox, as shown below.
• Furthermore, you can exclude or include individual selections using the checkboxes.
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• Selecting individual Markush results will bring up options to view the patent information, whether in PatentPak viewer format or PDF format.
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Some documents in SciFinder will contain the option to use the PatentPak Viewer as a method for viewing a patent.

• The PatentPak viewer is notable for annotating where in a document substances appear, even if the patent is in a different language.
  • This can decrease the time you spend searching through patents as well as allow you to get a general idea of the substances involved before requesting a translation of a patent.
  • Note that not every document will have the PatentPak Viewer available.
• Patents that have a PatentPak Viewer option will have an option to access it from under the PatentPak Options.
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• When in the PatentPak viewer, you can see what substances are annotated in the patent in the window on the left, while the document is on the right.
  • Clicking on the page number of a substance will jump to that page in the document.
  • Clicking on one of the pins in the document will highlight which substance it corresponds to in the left menu.
  • Also note that page numbers of the document might not match from the annotations and the document itself; eg. the title page may be paginated as page one in the annotation when the document itself does not.
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• Note that this also works for foreign language patents, and might help you identify information on patents before requesting a translation of a document.
  • This is by no means a replacement for translation services. If the patent is important, still get it translated professionally.
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