During the dear 1998, both the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) began offering on-line patent search capabilities on their websites free of charge. This has resulted in patent information being readily available to more people than ever before. Researchers, who never previously considered using patent data to supplement the basic literature, might be surprised at the wealth of underutilized information now available at no cost. Here, we attempt to

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... provide the first time user with a general introduction to finding patent information on the Internet.