Report:SureChem/Overview

Overview

The following section contains subjective comments about the system that represent our editor's opinions, and should not be viewed as fact. Editor's opinions include positive and negative judgments about the product written in consideration of wider context, including related products and the industry at large. Further subjective information is presented in clearly labeled "Editor's Notes" throughout the report.

SureChem is a chemical structure searching tool available through a paid subscription. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly subscriptions are available, and first time users can demo the product via a 24 hour trial. SureChem was previously available for free with association with FreePatentsOnline. Through SureChem, users can search controlled vocabulary patent and non-patent documents using SMILES code or searching by keyword.

The main feature of SureChem is the controlled vocabulary tags for chemical structures that are affixed to all of the included coverage. This means, for example, that "aspirin" and all of its synonyms (both in language and chemical structure form) are tagged with the same data by SureChem's parsing algorithm. Using this kind of controlled vocabulary to link together relevant documents with common language is extremely valuable in the chemical searching world, since there can be multitudes of ways to refer to the same structure. SureChem is impressively updated with the parsing data only a day after the patent and MEDLINE documents become available. SureChem's additional chemical indexing on top of the already present MeSH terms makes MEDLINE an even more impressive resource.

Searching within SureChem can be accomplished in several ways. In SureChem, SMILES code searching is supported via directly inputting the SMILES code or using the included chemical structure drawing tool. Chemical name searching and uploading .mol files (a default chemical table file format found in many programs such as ChemSketch) is also permitted. Keyword searching can also be used in nearly every available field within a patent, in combination with chemical structure searching, Boolean logic, and truncation.

Search management is not a strong point of SureChem, with the absence of search history functionality being the most obvious omission. This means that searchers will most likely look to use this tool as a supplementary tool to find relevant prior art with the highly effective system present and turn to another service to manage the records found.

Overall, SureChem is a powerful tool which brings reasonably cost-effective chemical structure searching to those without the budget to access high-priced manually indexed files. Users of SureChem will find options such as keyword searching, multiple methods for data exporting (such as chemical structure exporting), keyword highlighting, a secure connection option, and many useful and nuanced preferences and post-search filtering options based on chemical structure data. Although SureChem's machine-generated indexing cannot support Markush searching, and cannot match the quality of well known chemical sources such as CAplus, MARPAT and MMS, it can be a useful search aid to those who can accept a lower level of precision. SureChem is built on a solid foundation of controlled vocabulary and SMILES searching that will aid the target user who must find prior art references with the aid of chemical structure indexing.