Report:MARPAT on STN/Data Coverage/Summary

Summary

MARPAT contains specially indexed records and bibliographic data for families from 63 patenting authorities. The data collection represents a sub-set of chemical documents from CAplus; only patents with generically disclosed structures are included in the file. According to e-mail correspondence with a CAS representative, this country coverage chart on the CAS website is consistent for both CAplus and MARPAT. The Bibliographic and Partial Text Coverage section of this Summary page has a related coverage chart.

Other Coverage

Citations: The MARPAT file does not contain any citation data for patents with generic structure indexing. However, the records may be crossed into other files on STN to retrieve patent citation data. The CAplus bibliographic file, for example, contains some citation data for the United States (US), European Patent Office (EP), Patent Cooperation Treaty (WO/PCT), and Germany (DE) records (from 1997), France (FR) and United Kingdom (GB) (from 2003), Canada (CA) patents (from 2005), and citations from Japanese patent examiners for about 95% of Japanese (JP) B1 and B2 patents processed as basics and published September 21, 2011 or later.^[1]

Legal Status: Legal status is not included in MARPAT records, but crossfile searching on STN may procure the INPADOC legal status, or national legal status data from some patent files. CAplus includes legal status data for US patents (from 1980-present).^[2]

Family Data: Records are representative of CAplus patent families. Other family databases are hosted on platform STN and may be accessed by a crossfile search.

Document Images: Representative patent drawings are not included in the records, but may be found via a crossfile search on STN if necessary. Structure images of the CAS value-added generic structure indexing are available for each record. More than 79,000 chemical substance images were added to to the MARPAT and CA/CAplus databases on STN and SciFinder at the beginning of 2012, and structure graphics are now available for more than 75% of MARPAT records.^[3]

Bibliographic and Partial Text Coverage

Please note that gaps in coverage may exist in any collection due to a number of factors, such as missing documents, scanning errors, OCR errors, even failure of national and regional patent offices to report data. No data source can be considered 100% complete, and searchers should consult as many unique data sources as possible. See the following articles for a discussion of unique worldwide bibliographic and family data collections, such as INPADOC, the Derwent World Patents Index, and CAplus.

MARPAT contains specially indexed records and bibliographic data for families from 63 patenting authorities. The data collection represents a sub-set of chemical documents from CAplus; only patents with generically disclosed structures are included in the file. According to e-mail correspondence with a CAS representative in June 2011, this country coverage chart on the CAS website is consistent for both CAplus and MARPAT.

In January 2008, WIPO was added to MARPAT indexed countries. Chile, USSR, and Czechoslovakia are closed collections. The Republic of Korea has been included in MARPAT coverage since 2009,^[4] and Russian patents published after January 2000 are also covered.^[5] Beginning in 2012, CAS is also adding additional backfile coverage from 1987 on with Markush content for English, German, and Japanese-language patents.^[6]

A useful (but outdated) chart of MARPAT coverage was also produced in 2001. The image below shows coverage by date for the 33 countries that were then indexed into the MARPAT file, and their dates of coverage.^[7]

A chart of MARPAT coverage, from 2001

Editor's Note:

MARPAT contains structure records from patents from 63 patenting authorities around the world, more countries than are currently indexed into the Merged Markush Service (MMS) by Derwent.