Google Scholar v. Google Patents

“Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first” -- Mark Twain (American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer. 1835-1910)

Google Patents makes searching U.S. patents easy. Why search for patents on Google Scholar?

Two reasons …

1) World patents
2) Cites

If you are interested in patents granted outside the U.S., Google Scholar is the way to go.

An added benefit is the cite count for each item returned in a Google Scholar search. Sometimes you want to gauge the weight of a given article or patent. The cite count, that is, the number of times the item has been cited in other scholarly works, helps you do that.

To demonstrate, try searching for UOP patents in both Google Patents and Google Scholar.

The Patent search for this example …
dibenzothiophene inassignee:uop
The same search in Google Scholar:
dibenzothiophene uop patent
One result returned by Google Scholar …

Removal of sulfur-containing compounds from liquid hydrocarbon streams
JA Kocal … - US Patent 6,368,495, 2002 – Google Patents
… Brandvold, Arlington Heights. Assignee: UOP LLC
Cited by 33 – Related articles – All 2 versions

This particular UOP patent has been cited by other works 33 times. Might be worth a look.

Also worth a look … posts to the Desulfurization Blog (http://www.desulf.blogspot.com/). Pass this tip on to friends and colleagues. They will improve their online search results.