patent-family-tracing

Research

Forward/backward patent citation and priority tracing until saturation

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Patent Family Tracing

Traces patent citation networks and priority chains in both directions (forward citations, backward citations, priority links) until the search space saturates.

Stages

1. Seed Identification

Accept seed patents from calling strategy
Validate patent numbers and retrieve basic metadata
Establish initial frontier set

2. Priority Chain Tracing

For each seed, trace priority/continuation chain to find all family members
Identify provisional applications, continuations, divisionals, CIPs
Record priority dates and filing jurisdictions

3. Citation Expansion (Forward)

Find all patents that cite the seed/family patents
Assess relevance of citing patents to the target technology
Add relevant citations to the frontier

4. Citation Expansion (Backward)

Find all patents cited by the seed/family patents
Trace backward to foundational prior art
Add relevant references to the frontier

5. Saturation Check

Use saturation-detection SOP to determine if expansion has converged
Convergence criteria: <5% new relevant patents per iteration
If not saturated, return to Stage 3 with expanded frontier

Available SOPs

SOP	Role
patent-query-formulation	Generate queries for citation lookup
citation-network-analysis	Analyze the citation graph structure
legal-status-assessment	Check status of discovered family members
saturation-detection	Determine when expansion has converged

Execution Guidance

Run priority chain tracing first — this gives complete family coverage before citation expansion
Forward citations are more likely to reveal recent developments
Backward citations reveal foundational prior art
Limit citation depth to 3 generations unless strategy requires more
Deduplicate by patent family (same priority) not by individual publication

Yield Report

Report to calling strategy after each execution:

New patent families discovered this iteration
Total frontier size
Saturation percentage
Depth reached (citation generations)

Available SOPs

Optional, no fixed order; the final leaf is always a sop.

SOP	When to use
citation-network-analysis	Build and analyze patent citation networks — main path analysis, PageRank, cluster detection
knowledge-acquisition-saturation-detection	Determine when additional searching yields diminishing returns. Analyzes the latest expansion batch against existing corpus to judge continue/near-saturation/saturated. Used by snowball and systematic-survey.
legal-status-assessment	Determine patent legal status — active, expired, pending, lapsed, or revoked
patent-query-formulation	Construct keyword + IPC/CPC + assignee combination search strategies for patent databases