Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a provider of chemical information and a division of the American Chemical Society, reports that more than 50% of the organic and inorganic chemical substances recorded in the CAS Chemical Registry System during 2002 were derived from patent documents as opposed to journal literature and other publications. This finding highlights a trend evident since at least 1998 in which an increasing percentage of substances of this type have been reported for the first time in patents. CAS registers substances of all types as they are newly reported and come to the attention of CAS scientists who analyze and index patents from 37 issuing authorities, articles from more than 9,000 scientific journals, books and other documents published around the world. These scientists study each patent document, identify key concepts along with possibly dozens of claimed substances, and provide indexing that anticipates researchers' interests and the pathways they would explore to find this specific document. According to CAS, other important sources of organic and inorganic substances in addition to patent documents are journal literature and screening libraries, which generate many compounds for drug discovery.
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