What is Prior Art Search Services in Patent?

Like many other organizations, do you also have a question in your mind like ‘What is Prior Art search?’ If, yes then you have landed on the right page to get complete details about how the prior art search services operates. It is the key concept for helping your invention get the recognition it deserves.

All information of a patent or invention that is in public can be searched for reference with your invention. Your ideas need to be unique, and this search will assist you in determining the chances of patent application approval.

There are many professional companies that are offering prior art search services to help meet the diverse requirements of the clients for patent search results. The professional strategies of looking into the patent and non-patent databases to find relevant references are quite important for implementation under this task.

In this article, you will know about some of the best things about the prior art search. Follow this article till the end to get your answer for ‘What is prior art search.’

Types of Searches that are Performed under Prior Art Search

There are certain key strategies that the professionals follow for conducting the prior art search to help the organizations or businesses thrive with their patent application. For proceeding with the patent application, you need to produce reports and results of prior art searches, which is a common procedure. The professionals follow strategies such as:

• The professionals give time to understand your patent claim and its genuineness. Only after checking the novelty of your invention, the professionals will move ahead with the prior art search work process.
• The professionals execute a keyword-based search with all types of narrow and broad terms. The professionals make sure to do a combination of the keywords in a logical sense to get hold of some of the search queries.
• In the next step, the professionals do classification-based search programs such as IPC, ECLA, US, and CPC. There is a high chance that the maximum number of search queries can be found with this technique.
• In the next strategy, the professionals can search by making the inventor and assignee based prior art research. This will give out more relevant results to meet the requirements of the clients or businesses.
• In the next process, the professionals look for the forward patent, backward patent, and all the other non-patent literature or paper submissions to find relevant references.

These are just a few of the many strategies that are imposed by professional firms offering prior art search services. It is always better to hire professionals to make this task easy to strengthen your patent application.

How is Prior Art Search Conducted?

The step-wise explanation of prior art search includes few processes which work as a hierarchy for executing the prior art search. The detailed steps or processes of the prior art search include:

• Invention knowledge gaining
• Search for Classification
• Keyword Research
• Inventor Search
• Reference Shortlisting
• Patent Webbing

These are the processes through which a prior art search job is executed. All prior art searches must look not only for relevant patents but also for the non-patent literature. The non-patent literature actually documents that you can find over the internet publicly. Some of the domain that usually consists of non-patent pieces of literature are Scirus, Google Scholar, and others.

Not only that, but there are many journals publishes and are open to the public that can also be relevant to your invention. Therefore, it is quite important for the professionals to check them all precisely. Some of the common NPL sources are book chapters, thesis, dictionaries, and others. Every single aspect needs to be checked in order to check the patent for no resemblance.

Consideration and Importance of Patent or Prior Art Search

There are many considerations for availing a patent or prior art search. The first consideration remains that the invention must be new and unique. The prior art search should not be restricted to any particular category or area for searching. It must go beyond its restricted search pattern and check on all the relevant publications across the globe.

Due to the prior art search, the potential scope of it is usually immense. The prior art search professionals have the ability to speed up the process by focusing on English patent searches. Not only that but the search proceeds by checking the technical database. The prior art search professionals can work more proficiently if your invention is small. Simple searching with keywords at times also assists in finding relevant references for the patent. But if your invention is complex, then more research time will be required to complete the process.

Another Consideration and Importance Importance

The second consideration that the professionals emphasize is the analysis of the documents found. The novelty of any invention is purely based upon the publication. For the detailed analysis, every document is read manually and completely to check on the true attributes of the researched patents. All the aspects in the documents such as commentary, diagrams, figures, theoretical explanations, and other such attributes can cause a problem for your patenting if went unnoticed. Therefore, the professionals make sure that they cover all the segments of the search without much hassle.

The professionals check on all the expired and un-expired patents existing over the internet and across the world. This will help the people lookout for any of the relevant ideas that are public. Using this, the organization tweaks its patent technology and integration to make it stand out in the crowd, and the chances of patent approval increase.

If your product is an improvement of any of the existing inventions, then you can still get the patenting for it. You need to mention everything in detail on your publication about the improvement that you have tried to implement. You must also mention the patent or invention on which you have proposed an improvement patent claim. Search and analysis is therefore highly essential for people to come up with some of the best ideas and put it into publication without the sense of any troubles due to present ideas.

The professionals will help the people get the best patent comparison results to give them adequate solutions to give finishing design to the invention to make it stand out.

Impact on Patents Due to Prior Art Search

Everything that you invent, you need to apply for patenting it. There is a stipulated filing process under which the patenting work processes. At the time of submitting the patent claim or application, the authorities will conduct a prior art search for finding any of the relevant patents present before the date of your filing. If they found any such art present to the public that resembles your invention, then your idea goes invalid.

Therefore, before the authority does it, it is your responsibility to conduct a PAS. It is better to make amendments before facing a rejection. The professionals are on duty to assist the people in checking for any kind of overlapping in their inventions. With professional reporting and documentation, the patent application gets a high chance of approval.

Getting a grant for the invention is not that easy task as you need to consider all the relevant references and tweak your inventions to make it different from them. The main motto of the search is to find the existing prior arts and then make amendments. This process is just to assist the people to strengthen their patent application.

What is the prior art search? 

The answer to this question is now evident as it is the sole solution for the organizations to find out ways to help give a clean chit to the patents. If no prior art search is found, then you have done a wonderful job in making a unique invention. But if found, you need to amend your works to save it from rejection.

Define your scope of protection with the help of prior art search results. The prosecution time can be easily reduced, with no office actions required. You need to go through amendments if any resembling patent is available for you. The risk of rejections can be completely eradicated with the help of a PAS.

The cost of the services is pretty high, but they are worth the investment. You do not want to face rejection and then work on improving your patent. Therefore, it is better to conduct the search prior to submitting the application as it will help you recognize the plus points and minus points of your invention. You can check on special attributes that your invention has as compared to other resembling references.

Conclusion

These are a few of the things that you must keep in mind whenever you have a question in mind, such as ‘What is prior art search?’. This article is a definite answer to explain the efficacy of prior art searches for the patents.

You need to make up your mind to adapt the professional prior art searches as they have the experience to do it faster and more efficiently. You can always try doing it all by yourself, but there is a chance that you would miss out on something important. Therefore, professionals can be your best bet.