Central Patents Index (CPI) as a Source of Information for the Pharmaceutical Chemist

This paper gives a brief outline of the Derwent CPI service (a more detailed general description of CPI has recently been published by Oppenheiml), but concentrates mainly on the online retrieval of patent information of use to the medicinal chemist. CPI is a comprehensive abstracting, alerting and retrieval service covering all the chemical type patents emanating from 26 major patent issuing authorities, which are listed in Table I. It forms part of the World Patent Index (WPI) database which also incorporates non-chemical patents.