CAS SciFinder SearchSense incorporates AI into the Basic Search by default. SearchSense allows for natural language queries and offers AI-enhanced search results, including an AI-generated summary. The 'Advanced Search' option does not utilize AI, and can still be used as a traditional search. CAS SciFinder-n does not capture user interactions to train LLMs.
SearchSense is limited to search and return answers only from CAS data. After entering your plain language question or terms in the homepage search bar, it evaluates and delivers the results based on relevance.
If your search generates 5 or more results, an AI Summary will appear. Select 'View All' to expand the summary and see linked citations to the CAS SciFinder content that was used to generate the summary. You should check these citations to make sure that AI summarized the content accurately.
To the upper left of your results, you will see a Query Interpretation button. Select this button to open a side panel showing which search terms AI extracted from your query. This also displays a Search Original Query option to re-run the search without AI. Search Original Query will likely return more results than the AI-powered search, but they may be less focused. The search results are organized into several categories of tabs: All, Substances, Reactions, References, Suppliers, and Patent Markush. The tab that CAS's AI deems most relevant will open by default, but you may view the other tabs' results too.
Prior Art Discovery is an AI-powered tool to find similar patents and non-patent literature results in CAS SciFinder. To access this tool, select Prior Art Discovery below the homepage search box. Then enter at least 200 characters of natural English text (e.g., claims or abstract text) relating to the novelty of the invention or topic of research.
You may edit the Priority Date, which is compared against the non-patent literature's publication date. If you want to see anything that has been published, leave the priority date as the current date. If you only want to see results that were published before a certain date, edit the priority date to that date. You may also add a structure by selecting the Draw button on the right side of search box. This boosts the relevance of documents that involve your substance or substances that are structurally similar to your structure. Patent results and Non-Patent Literature results are available as separate tabs on the results page.
