| name | prior-art-search |
| description | Evaluate novelty of specific invention — find relevant prior art across patents, publications, and products. Budget: 80 patent families, 20 claim parses, 50 web searches. |
| execution | strategy |
| dependencies | {"tactics":["classification-navigation","knowledge-acquisition-claim-decomposition","patent-family-tracing"],"sops":["citation-network-analysis","claim-parsing","knowledge-acquisition-saturation-detection","legal-status-assessment","patent-query-formulation","patent-synthesis","quality-scoring"]} |
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 | Current | % |
|---|
| Patent families analyzed | 80 | 0 | 0% |
| Claim parses completed | 20 | 0 | 0% |
| Web searches completed | 50 | 0 | 0% |
| Relevant prior art refs | — | 0 | — |
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 |
