SCIENCE-SPECIFIC SEARCH ENGINE SCIRUS ANNOUNCES THE ADDITION OF 13 MIL PATENTS : Elsevier today announced that its free science-specific search engine, Scirus, has now indexed 13 million patents.

Patents indexed in Scirus include those from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) . By making patents available through its index, Scirus has expanded its service to include these new information sources.

Scirus is touting itself as being the "go-to" tool for finding relevant scientific and academic information on the Web. Scirus is recognizing the value of patent information to the scientific community to assist in building upon previous research and technology.

The patent index data included in Scirus was obtained via an alliance with LexisNexis. Patents are loaded in Scirus in close cooperation with LexisNexis, using Scirus' technology for indexing scientific information.

Scirus' users can search for patents with the same fielded search capabilities. This includes the ability to search the index by title, abstract, author, date and affiliation. Users who require more in-depth patent searches are directed to specialized patent search tools offered through LexisNexis.

The patents indexed in Scirus have been selected on the criteria of being either scientific in nature or relevant to the scientific community based upon categorization used by patent offices. Every patent search result found on Scirus provides a link to the full text at the appropriate patent office or to EPO's Esp@cenet.