China leads all nations in publication of chemical patents

Columbus, Ohio — Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society and source of global chemical information, reports that China’s patent office is now the world’s leading producer of patent invention applications in chemistry. China trailed Japan’s patent office, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the United States’ patent office (USPTO) for more than a decade, but passed the USPTO in 2005, WIPO in 2006, and exceeded Japan for the first time on a monthly basis in 2008. In 2009, China will record an entire year as the number one producer of chemical patents, and CAS projects that trend to continue.

“Chemistry is widely recognized as ‘the central science,'” says Dr Matthew Toussant, senior vice president of editorial operations at CAS. “Chemical patents are a critical component to many industrial processes and scientific realms, including medicine and natural products. In fact, on average, 35 percent of new patent invention applications involve chemical substances.”

“CAS has been recording the phenomenal growth of patent documents in the last decade, with the number of chemistry-related patent publications by the USPTO and WIPO growing by more than 500 percent,” said Christine McCue, vice president of marketing at CAS. “Meanwhile, Chinese invention applications increased by nearly 1,400 percent, with much of that growth taking place in the pharmaceutical sector. More than half of the China patent applications during this period were from inventors within China, which surely indicates that Chinese scientists now also recognize the importance of monetizing research discoveries.”

Hundreds of CAS scientists, aided by state-of-the-art technology, identify and record the chemistry obscured in patents that standard search engines cannot locate. Proprietary technology systems developed by CAS enable scientists working around the world to analyze patents from 60 global patent authorities.

Patent documents meeting CAS selection criteria from nine major patent offices are available in the company’s databases within two days of the patents’ issuance, and are fully indexed in less than 27 days. CAS scientists add value to the data they collect, entering chemical names, a unique CAS registry number, literature references, property data, commercial availability, preparation details, spectra, and regulatory information from international sources into CAS databases.