prior-art-search

Research

Evaluate novelty of specific invention — find relevant prior art across patents, publications, and products. Budget: 80 patent families, 20 claim parses, 50 web searches.

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Prior Art Search

Targeted prior art search to evaluate the novelty of a specific invention. Searches patents, academic publications, and commercial products for anticipating or obviating references.

Purpose

Determine whether a specific invention is novel and non-obvious by systematically finding the closest prior art. Supports freedom-to-operate analysis and patentability assessments.

Budget

Metric	Target
Patent families analyzed	80
Claim parses	20
Web searches completed	50

State Ledger

Metric	Target	%
Patent families analyzed	80	0%
Claim parses completed	20	0%
Web searches completed	50	0%
Relevant prior art refs	—	—

HARD-GATE: Cannot exit iteration loop until 80% of patent families (64), claim parses (16), and web searches (40) budget met.

Available Tactics

Tactic	When to Use
patent-family-tracing	Trace citation chains from closest prior art
classification-navigation	Find related patents via IPC/CPC neighborhood
claim-decomposition	Parse claims of closest references for element-by-element comparison

Available SOPs

SOP	Role in This Strategy
patent-query-formulation	Generate targeted queries from invention disclosure
claim-parsing	Parse claims of found prior art for comparison
citation-network-analysis	Identify main citation paths leading to the invention
legal-status-assessment	Check if prior art references are still active
quality-scoring	Rank prior art by relevance and quality
saturation-detection	Check if prior art search has converged
patent-synthesis	Produce prior art search report

Execution Guidance

Invention decomposition — Break the target invention into key technical features
Query formulation — Use patent-query-formulation with invention features as input
Broad search — Execute web searches across patent and non-patent literature
Citation tracing — Use patent-family-tracing from closest hits
Classification search — Use classification-navigation in relevant IPC/CPC areas
Claim parsing — Parse claims of top 20 closest references with claim-parsing
Element comparison — Map invention features against prior art elements
Saturation check — Confirm search completeness with saturation-detection
Synthesis — Produce prior art report with relevance rankings

Output Format

# Prior Art Search Report: [Invention Title]

## Invention Summary
[Key technical features of the target invention]

## Search Strategy
[Queries used, databases searched, classification codes explored]

## Closest Prior Art (ranked by relevance)
| Rank | Reference | Type | Date | Relevance | Elements Anticipated |
|------|-----------|------|------|-----------|---------------------|

## Element-by-Element Comparison
[Feature matrix: invention elements vs. prior art coverage]

## Novelty Assessment
[Analysis of which elements are novel vs. anticipated]

## Non-Obviousness Analysis
[Combination analysis — would PHOSITA combine references?]

## Conclusion
[Overall patentability/FTO assessment]

Available Tactics

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

Tactic	When to use
classification-navigation	IPC/CPC hierarchy drill-down and lateral expansion for patent discovery
knowledge-acquisition-claim-decomposition	Independent/dependent claim parsing, element extraction, and feature mapping to technical domains
patent-family-tracing	Forward/backward patent citation and priority tracing until saturation

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
claim-parsing	Patent claim syntax parsing — independent/dependent relationships and element extraction
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
patent-synthesis	Produce final structured patent intelligence report from all analysis results
quality-scoring	Multi-dimensional patent quality assessment — forward citations, family size, claim count, geographic breadth