Cross-Refences in Patent Documents

Patent documents are cross-referenced in the following ways:

1) U.S. Patents (since about 1971) provides a list of document citations on the front page; U.S. Patents earlier than 1971 (but after about 1950) list the cited documents on the last page; prior to about 1950, no single collection of cited documents is provided, but the text of the document can contain citations almost anywhere;

2) elsewhere in the U.S. Patent, particularly in the Background portion of the document (at the beginning of the text) various "prior art" are described, but other portions of the disclosure can cite documents, e.g., patents, application serial numbers, and technical papers as well;

3) in a foreign Patent document, prior art, e.g., patent documents, are usually found in the Background or first portion of the text of the document, but may be found anywhere in the text; and,

4) in WO Search Reports.

The espacenet.com website of the EPO provides a list of cited documents for any given patent document hit; as well as a link to a list of referencing documents (i.e., documents that contain a cite to the "hit"). The USPTO website search engine gives links for all front page US patent document citations (when the document is viewed in TEXT mode) and provides the field index "ref/" to use in the query box to list referencing US Patents.


Francis "Fran" Lorin
siberkhem.com