On reviewing several competing services (CAS, IBM, MicroPatent,
Corporate Intelligence), it is clear that nothing else comes close
to meeting our needs. (QPat's non-accounts-receivable section
also responded promptly.) So we will continue with QPat and
get an annual subscription to save AR unnecessary burdens.
Briefly, our needs are as follows:
We use online searching extensively to build up our
Japanese-English technical dictionaries. Researching terms
often requires us to browse several (up to 100 per day)
documents based on searches of proximate known terms. The
target terms are rarely in abstracts and usually buried in the
text. This means that services that only provide front-page
searching and have cumbersome and expensive fulltext
viewing are unworkable.
QPat is the only service that is compatible with our needs.