CAS ― powering innovative solutions that enable breakthroughs and empower scientific discovery

At Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, scientists, technologists and business leaders continuously and passionately pursue new knowledge to fuel scientific discovery and empower innovation.

Dedicated to the ACS vision of improving people’s lives through the transforming power of chemistry, the CAS team of highly trained scientists finds, collects and organizes all publicly disclosed substance information, creating the world’s most reliable collection of content that is vital to innovation worldwide. CAS provides a suite of solutions relied on by researchers, patent professionals and decision-makers around the world that advance the scientific enterprise by enabling discovery and facilitating workflows.

Powerful new solutions fuel discoveries

CAS added several new solutions to its portfolio in 2015. 

• NCI™ Global provides regulatory information for organizations that manufacture, import, export or transport chemicals. Updated weekly, inventories and regulatory lists are organized by country, so users can get right to the information they need.
• PatentPak™ is a robust workflow solution designed to radically reduce time spent acquiring and searching through multiple patents to find vital chemistry. PatentPak allows researchers to instantly access full-text patents from major patent offices globally, rapidly find specific locations of chemical information within the patents and find equivalent patents in familiar languages with patent family connections. PatentPak is now available in SciFinder® and STN®.
• Enhancements to CHEMCATS® allow researchers to conveniently find chemicals for purchase from reputable chemical suppliers as part of their SciFinder search.

Authoritative content builds the foundation

More than 1,000 scientists around the world assemble, curate, and assure the quality of the CAS content, so researchers can efficiently and reliably explore the largest collection of disclosed chemical synthesis information from 1840 to the present. Consistent with past performance, CAS databases experienced robust growth, with more than 1.5 million patents, journal articles and other disclosed research sources added, for a new total of more than 42 million records available in the CAplus^SM database. Updated daily, CAS added more than 1.7 million new single-step reactions to CASREACT®, with more than 85 million single- and multi-step reactions, plus synthetic preparations now available to researchers.

The CAS REGISTRY^SM is the largest and most authoritative collection of chemical substance information available to researchers and covers 63 worldwide patent authorities. In addition to covering substances from journals and patents, CAS REGISTRY includes substances from chemical catalogs, worldwide governmental regulatory agencies and reputable web resources. In 2015, more than 13.5 million new substances were added to CAS REGISTRY, which now contains more than 105 million unique organic and inorganic substances. The 100 millionth CAS Registry Number® (CAS RN™ 1786400-23-4) was assigned June 29, 2015, from a substance reported in a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) patent (WO 2015081280). The inventors from Coferon Inc. in Stony Brook, N.Y., claim the molecule is a novel therapeutic designed to treat acute myeloid leukemia.

CAS ensures comprehensive patent information within its databases, including multiple basics coverage from all covered authorities. Supplementing the disclosed chemistry added to CAS databases from document analysis, CHEMCATS®, the CAS chemical catalogs database, helps researchers more quickly locate the chemicals they need with direct access to hundreds of commercial chemical suppliers.

SciFinder provides the most relevant information solutions for scientists

Organizations around the globe rely on SciFinder for research discovery with access to comprehensive scientific information using an array of powerful tools that drive more confident research decisions. The world’s leading commercial, academic and government organizations recognize the value of ensuring unlimited access to SciFinder for their entire research teams spanning disciplines including chemistry, pharmaceutical, agrochemical, biotechnology research, and more.

In addition to making PatentPak available in SciFinder during 2015, CAS continued to add more content than any other scientific resource, enhanced the most frequently sought after physical properties and additional experimental procedures, and increased visibility of chemical suppliers.

The SciFinder Future Leaders program celebrated its sixth year in 2015, with 20 new students participating from 17 countries. New for 2015, CAS also hosted the first ever SciFinder Future Leaders alumni program, with all previous program participants invited to return to Columbus, Ohio for the event. SciFinder Future Leaders provides students and post doctorates with the exclusive opportunity to share their research experience with CAS scientists and each other, and to take part in the Fall ACS National Meeting. To date, the program has hosted more than 100 students and post doctorates from 50 countries.

STN delivers unique content, unparalleled search power and precision, and proven reliability for intellectual property professionals

As the premier single source for the world's disclosed scientific and technical research, intellectual property professionals and patent examiners at the world's major patent offices and research organizations rely on STN to answer business critical questions and make informed decisions. In 2015, new STN was enhanced with new biomedical content, including BIOSIS®, MEDLINE® and Embase®, as well as adding life science databases CABA and FSTA. New features and interface refinements also enhanced usability. A new release of BizInt Smart Charts for Patents was also integrated with new STN to enable more efficient, insightful reporting and analysis of search results.

Researchers around the world rely on CAS

CAS continued to invest in providing authoritative and innovative solutions dedicated to advancing the scientific enterprise. Investments in its strategic framework in 2015 added an innovation function to identify and prioritize new market opportunities, as well as a program management office to provide consistency across initiatives. Significant modernizations to CAS’s content and development architectures also poise CAS to more effectively support research now and into the future, and expansion of dedicated global representatives enhanced global customer support. With several new solutions planned for 2016 and beyond, CAS is continuously investing for the future.