Online patent searching -- useful, but still in its infancy

In the Patent Offices of industrialized nations and in most large and some medium sized companies, online searching has become a useful tool for retrieving patent documents. Three online searchers, each from a different technical field, report on how they make use of patent databases offered by different hosts, what they consider to be advantageous and where difficulties are not yet overcome. The usage of Derwent's World Patent Index and of the Chemical Abstracts database for searching patents related to chemical substances is outlined as well as the retrieval procedure for patent documents in the mechanical and electrical engineering field in the Derwent and Inpadoc databases.