Electronic Non-Patent Literature Available at the USPTO
The Scientific and Technical Information (STIC) provides examiners access to Non-Patent
Literature (NPL) through multiple electronic tools purchased from various publishers. These tools
are available to examiners, organized by Technology Center (TC), on the NPL web page which is
located on the Patent Examiner’s Toolkit. NPL encompasses all the TC subject areas and includes
electronic books, periodicals, conferences, standards, dissertations, and much more. STIC
currently subscribes to 59,000 electronic journals and over 145,000 electronic books in full text.
The following charts provide a sampling of e-book and e-journal resources available to examiners.
Major Publishers of Electronic Non-Patent Literature Available at USPTO - Electronic Books
| Publisher | E-Book Count |
| ACM | 920 |
| CRC | 4,801 |
| Ebrary | 74,484 |
| EBSCO eBook Collection | 2,284 |
| Elsevier E-book (Referex) | 2,270 |
| IEEE Conference Proceedings/Conferences | 7,568 |
| Knovel | 4,115 |
| Matthew Bender eBooks | 7 |
| MyiLibrary | 923 |
| Ovid | 90 |
| Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) | 881 |
| Safari | 17,521 |
| SPIE | 4,485 |
| Springer | 23,143 |
| USENIX | 37 |
| Wiley | 900 |
| Wiley (Cochrane Library and Current Protocols) | 666,752 records |
| Xrefer (CREDO) | 118 |
Major Publishers of Electronic Non-Patent Literature Available at USPTO - Electronic Journals
| Publisher | E-Journal Count | Coverage |
| American Chemical Society (ACS) Publications | 59 | 1879-present |
| American Institute of Physics (AIP) Publications | 16 | 1929-present |
| American Society Microbiology (ASM) | 14 | 1916-present |
| APS (Physics) | 26 | 1893-present |
| Association For Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library | 245 plus 2 million pages of text | 1952-present |
| BioOne | 73 | 1999-present |
| BNA - Intellectual Property on the Web | 1929-present | |
| CambridgeSoft Corporation - Merck Index-Online | 11,338 records | 19th century forward |
| Ebsco Online - ASP, BCS, Computer Source | 36,330 | 1887-present |
| Elsevier - Science Direct | 1,682 | 1995-present |
| Faulkner Technical Reports (Faccts) | 1,200 reports | |
| HeinOnline | 52 | 1894-present |
| Highwire Press | 7 | 1903-present |
| Institute Of Electrical And Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Xplore | 1,446 | 1913-present |
| The Institute of Physics And IOP Publishing | 91 | 1899-present |
| International Society Optical Engineering (SPIE) Digital Library |
80,000 documents
|
1934-present |
| John Wiley & Sons | 519 | 1881-present |
| JSTOR - Business & General Science Collections | 54 | 1854-2004 |
| Kenneth Mason Publications - Research Disclosure On Web | 600 editions | 45 year span |
| Mary Ann Liebert | 50 | 1981-present |
| Optical Society of America (OSA) | 20 | 1962-present |
| OVID | 104 | 1950-present |
| Oxford University Press | 19 | 1983-present |
| ProQuest | 16,746 | 1857-present |
| Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) | 41 | 1876-present |
| Springer Link | 1,489 | 1832-present |
| Usenix - The Advanced Computing Systems Association | 20 | 1993-present |
Disclaimer
Patent examiners are not required to search every listed resource in the examination of an application. The examiner will determine the most appropriate resources for that application by relying upon their professional judgment and assessment of disclosed and claimed subject matter in the application under consideration.
