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

This communication provides an easy-to-follow protocol for using the free Internet-accessible scientific search engine, Scirus, to search for and subsequently retrieve published patents from several patent offices in portable document format (PDF). Hints on how to 'read' patents and how to extract relevant information, as well as how to export bibliographic data from Scirus and how to cite patents, are also given. The reason for providing such a protocol is that a vast amount of information, also of potential interest to life scientists, is largely hidden for those not knowing how to access these data. Several examples are provided that highlight the reasons to include patent searches into the workflow of life scientists. These include early access to data before publication, patents as a source of data that never appear in the literature and patents as a source of critical information otherwise hard to get from commercial suppliers. Finally, alternative free patent search services are briefly discussed, and their differences are highlighted.