Patent information in biotechnology

Patents represent an important source of scientific and legal information. Unfortunately, many of the major sources of biotechnology scientific information (for example, Medline and Biosis) do not index patents. It is probable that information of importance to the field of biotechnology reported in patents is not available in the scientific-journal literature. This article gives a brief overview of patent law from the standpoint of the technical information content of patents, and provides a survey of relevant sources of patent information for retrospective searching and for current awareness.