CAS covers characterized substances identified in all patents:
- Claimed and exemplified substances with supporting data
- Markush structures
In addition, CAS covers items identified in the Examples section of patents:
- Exemplified prophetic substances - Specific but uncharacterized substances (e.g., reactants, isolated intermediates, products) identified by chemical name or structure, including structures displayed in a table. Patents with one million or more exemplified prophetic substances published on or after January 1, 2015 are covered in CAS Markush by one or more Markush structures covering unambiguously described substances lacking further property data.
- Exemplified prophetic uses - Novel but unsubstantiated uses of known substances
CAS coverage includes exemplified prophetic substances and uses identified in patents in all languages from the nine major patent offices from January 2009-present. Coverage also includes English-, French-, and German-language patents from 1998-2008 and selected patents from the same languages from 1993-1997. CAS has comprehensive coverage of prophetic substances from Japanese Patent Office (JPO) patent documents from 2009 to present. In addition, prophetic substances were extracted from selected Japanese patents from 2008 back through 2000.
Newly identified prophetic substances are assigned CAS Registry Numbers®, added to REGISTRY, and indexed in CAS References. Reactions involving prophetic substances (whether reactants, intermediates or products) are added to CAS Reactions.
CAS indexing of prophetic substances and uses in CAS References is considered supplemental to standard patent indexing. It does not fall under the CAS timeliness guarantee of full indexing within 27 days of receipt of patents from the nine major patent offices.
Peptide, protein, and oligonucleotide sequences that have fewer than 253 non-hydrogen atoms and, therefore, are small enough to have connection tables, may be indexed as prophetics.
CAS coverage of exemplified prophetic substances and uses is available in CAS SciFinder and STN. On STN, the CA/CAS References roles thesaurus includes the prophetic substances and uses super role (PRPH) for searching in CA/CAS References and REGISTRY. Additional roles may be assigned for uses of prophetic substances. For more information, see the CAS Roles in CA/CAS References Quick Reference Card (PDF)