Patent Quality Matters | Article One Partners Blog

Featured Resource: WorldWideScience.org

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

WorldWideScience.org is a free, international, collaborative database search tool, offering simple and advanced search of government science documents from all over the world.  It was created by the U.S. Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) but is governed by a diverse alliance of official science and information agencies from a wide array of countries.

Strong Growth 

The WorldWideScience site was launched in 2007 with 12 available databases from 10 participating countries. Since the launch it has increased its offerings many times over, and now includes national and international databases from over 70 countries.  As of 2010, around 400 million pages of science were available for search.  

Multilingual Search

In June 2010, WorldWideScience.org introduced multilingual search powered by Microsoft Research.  Specifically, the site's non-English offerings include “scientific literature from databases in China, Russia, France, and several Latin American countries” and the ability to have search results translated into nine languages.  Representatives of WorldWideScience note a trend of increasing publication of non-English scientific literature, making the introduction of this feature a timely one.  All of the available multilingual databases are grouped together on the advanced search page, making it easy to narrow down the breadth of a search in order to focus on a particular foreign language or set of languages. 

A Variety of Helpful Non-Patent Literature

WorldWideScience not only offers search for the full text of journal articles and studies from government-funded science, but also for speech components from other media.  Launched this year and considered a milestone by those involved in the organization, widespread search for non-text media is a first for the international science community.  According to OSTI’s director, Dr. Walter Warnick, “R&D results are increasingly recorded in video, audio, animation, and visualization”--making speech-indexed search an important new step in comprehensive science literature search. 

On its own, WorldWideScience's huge amount of data makes it a great choice for doing prior art search on the complete range of technologies.  But being able to access all that data in a number languages and in different media formats, all in one place, makes it a truly useful tool for finding rare prior art.