Scientific Articles and Books Online – Update January 2022
If you work in the area of Intellectual Property then you know that any publication in this world can potentially serve as a so-called “prior art documents”, for establishing what has been known when a patent application had been filed. Only what is novel over the prior art can be protected by patents.
But patent attorneys use scholar articles not very often for prior art purposes, mostly because they are not written to a degree that they provide sufficient disclosure for that: “… the description must disclose any feature essential for carrying out the invention in sufficient detail to render it apparent to the skilled person how to put the invention into practice.” (click here). I understand that scientific articles are in the first place not about inventions, and most of the time they are not even about discoveries. But that would lead to another thread that I do not wish to explore today: are science efforts useful at all?
But let’s assume that you take scientific disclosure into account when doing prior art searches.
Google Scholar and The Lens
You all know the two classics in the scholarly domain when it comes to scientific articles: Google Scholar (click here) and The Lens (click here).
While Google Scholar has secured the cooperation of 225 public organisations with in average 80% of the inventories. There are estimates that Google Scholar contains about 100 million citations, as of January 2022. The Lens boasts on its website that it contains 245.5 mio “scholarly works”, 137.1 mio patents and 371 mio DNA sequences, as of January 2022.
It goes without saying that many of those articles can be downloaded for free from Sci-Hub. Because this website is perceived as illegal in many (but not all) countries, it does not come with a fixed Internet address. You can find it via the commonly known Internet search engines.
Other Scholar Writing Resources
Here comes a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com – Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org – a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries: find out where the nearest physical book is that you need
https://link.springer.com – access to more than 10 million scientific documents (books, articles, research protocols, etc.)
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries
http://repec.org – volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related areas
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is a large website for books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is another database on academic studies texts
How To Find This Information In The Future
I have a secret to share with you: most of the Tips of the Week I am writing for myself. This is how the weekly “Tip of the Week” service started: I found a useful piece of information and I wanted to put it to some dedicated place where I can find it again easily. That dedicated place is my “overview articles” department, here: https://ip-lawyer-tools.com/category/free-articles/overview-articles/
The present article goes into the “Online Entertainment and Online Shopping” section, here https://ip-lawyer-tools.com/online-entertainment-and-online-shopping/, under “Find e-books and other publications online”.
Call-to-Action
Check out the other information in the “overview articles” department, you will like it.
Martin “Online” Schweiger