Citations & Family
The Citations tab and Family tab show the patent’s connections to other documents — the prior art it relied on, the patents that have since cited it, and related filings in other jurisdictions.
Citations
The Citations tab has three sections, each loaded and counted separately. Every section shows its own total and starts with the first 25 entries. Click Load More to pull the next batch. A section with thousands of citations no longer has to finish loading before you can read the others.
Patent Citations
Patents that the examiner or applicant cited as prior art during prosecution. These are sometimes called backward citations — documents that existed before this patent was filed and were considered relevant to patentability.
Each row shows:
- Publication Number — links to that patent in GoVeda
- Priority Date — the earliest priority date of the cited patent
- Publication Date — when the cited patent was published
- Assignee — the original applicant or assignee
- Title — the title of the cited patent
Non-Patent Citations
Non-patent literature (NPL) cited during prosecution, such as academic papers, textbooks, standards documents, or technical articles. Each entry shows the full reference text.
Cited By
Patents that have cited this patent after its publication. These are forward citations — they show where this patent has been used as prior art by later filers.
The table format and columns are the same as Patent Citations. Click any publication number to open that patent.
Coverage. Citations are aggregated across the patent’s INPADOC extended family, rather than the single document you’re viewing. That’s usually what you want, since a citation raised against the EP sibling is still evidence about this invention. It does mean the totals run higher than the front page of any one document would suggest.
