Citation searching

Citations tab: on the right panel of the hitlist: 
The Citations tab contains all the citations for a patent family or a patent/patent application:

• Cited patents
• Citing patents
• Cited literature 
• Standards citing the family/patent

NB: if the Citations tab is not displayed, select it via the "+" button on the right panel on the far right side at the top:

• The Citations tab displays a summary section where you can see at a glance:
  • Total number of cited and citing patents/patent families, including the number of citations with USPTO rejection details, these are hyperlinked (as applicable) 
  • Whether this family has cited Non-Patent Literature (NPL)
  • Whether this family has been cited in standards (Standard Essential Patents – SEPs)
    

Click on any of the hyperlinks to jump into the appropriate section:

Cited and citing patents/patent families
The Citations tab displays for each cited/citing patent/patent family: 

• Publication Number
• First Application Date 
• Patent Assignee
• Citation origin
• Category code (when applicable)
• Title
  

For US patents and applications it also provides a link to the USPTO communication regarding the examiner rejection codes (102, 103, DBL, 101) via the "Details" hyperlink placed under the category code. Clicking on this hyperlink will open a small window with a link to the PDF.

Hitlist
From the hitlist, you can search cited or citing patents or both for the selected patents from your result set (max 80,000):

Cited: Patents backward cited by at least one member of the selected family
Citing: Patents forward citing at least one member of the selected family

The "Advanced citation search" adds the option of choosing more specific citation categories including:

• Self or non-self citations
• Citation origin (examiner, applicant or 3rd party)
• Citation category related to novelty or obviousness (categories X, Y, I, 102, 103).

Category codes

EPO Examiner citation categories:

• X : Particularly relevant if taken alone (lack of novelty or lack of inventive step)
• Y : Particularly relevant if combined with another document in the same family (non-obviousness)
• A : Technological background (no objection of lack of novelty or inventive step)
• O : non-written (e.g. oral) disclosure
• P : Intermediate document (published after priority date but before filing date of the application; used in combination with X, Y, A (e.g. XP)
• T : Theory or principle underlying the invention
• E : Earlier patent document, but published on, or after, the filing date
• D : Document cited in the application
• L : Document cited for other reasons
• Other : No relevancy code
  

USPTO Examiner citation categories

• 102 : Non-novel subject matter
• 103 : Obvious subject matter
• DBL: Double patenting, claim is anticipated or obvious in view of another claim in a separate patent filed by the same applicant
• 101 : "subject matter eligibility" or "Alice" rejection, claims relate to a type of invention that is ineligible for patent protection
  
  > To know more, see article Explore results of your Citation search