While much of their internal R&D data is proprietary, the efforts of the pharmaceutical industry, including the commercial drug development phase (CDEV), are extensively documented, even if not completely transparent. Evidence for this can be found in a simple PubMed query ( Novartis OR AstraZeneca OR Pfizer OR Boehringer OR Glaxo, searching "affiliations" in the last 10 years) that returns 25,406 peer-reviewed journal articles (accessed July 2019). Searching WO patent assignees with the same names and time period returns 4,566 published patents. These documents disclose a significant amount of the proprietary data after a time lag of sometimes less than two years from the internal generation phase. However, terms of medicinal chemistry SAR first-disclosures this patent corpus represents a considerable (probably at least~ 5-fold) redundancy overcount due to the many ancillary applications around lead series, such as routes of synthesis, crystal structures, new indications and combinations.