| name | patent-family-tracing |
| description | Forward/backward patent citation and priority tracing until saturation |
| execution | tactic |
| dependencies | {"sops":["citation-network-analysis","knowledge-acquisition-saturation-detection","legal-status-assessment","patent-query-formulation"]} |
Patent Family Tracing
Traces patent citation networks and priority chains in both directions (forward citations, backward citations, priority links) until the search space saturates.
Stages
1. Seed Identification
- Accept seed patents from calling strategy
- Validate patent numbers and retrieve basic metadata
- Establish initial frontier set
2. Priority Chain Tracing
- For each seed, trace priority/continuation chain to find all family members
- Identify provisional applications, continuations, divisionals, CIPs
- Record priority dates and filing jurisdictions
3. Citation Expansion (Forward)
- Find all patents that cite the seed/family patents
- Assess relevance of citing patents to the target technology
- Add relevant citations to the frontier
4. Citation Expansion (Backward)
- Find all patents cited by the seed/family patents
- Trace backward to foundational prior art
- Add relevant references to the frontier
5. Saturation Check
- Use
saturation-detection SOP to determine if expansion has converged
- Convergence criteria: <5% new relevant patents per iteration
- If not saturated, return to Stage 3 with expanded frontier
Available SOPs
| SOP | Role |
|---|
| patent-query-formulation | Generate queries for citation lookup |
| citation-network-analysis | Analyze the citation graph structure |
| legal-status-assessment | Check status of discovered family members |
| saturation-detection | Determine when expansion has converged |
Execution Guidance
- Run priority chain tracing first — this gives complete family coverage before citation expansion
- Forward citations are more likely to reveal recent developments
- Backward citations reveal foundational prior art
- Limit citation depth to 3 generations unless strategy requires more
- Deduplicate by patent family (same priority) not by individual publication
Yield Report
Report to calling strategy after each execution:
- New patent families discovered this iteration
- Total frontier size
- Saturation percentage
- Depth reached (citation generations)
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 |
| 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 |
