FPO Adds Non-Patent Literature Collection

FreePatentsOnline (FPO) has added a full-text collection of non-patent literature to its suite of patent databases. Not much is stated about the collection, but according to the copyright notice that appears in each record it appears to be sourced from Gale Cengage Learning, a producer of full-text and bibliographic databases. The NPL collection can be searched alone or with the patent collections.

NPL records include bibliographic data, full-text and tables, but not images. Date coverage appears to start as far back as the early 1980s up through March 2011. In addition to full-text searching, it is possible to limit searches to specific fields such as author name (use IN), article title (use TTL) , and full text (use SPEC). Searching by patent classification is not possible as none of the articles appear to have USPC or IPC codes.