| name | search-prior-art-pjt222 |
| title | Search Prior Art |
| description | Search for prior art relevant to a specific invention or patent claim. Covers patent literature, non-patent literature (academic papers, products, open source), defensive publications, and standard-essential patents. Use when evaluating whether an invention is novel and non-obvious before filing, challenging the validity of an existing patent, supporting a freedom-to-operate analysis, documenting a defensive publication, or responding to a patent office action questioning novelty or obviousness. |
| author | pjt222 |
| author_url | https://github.com/pjt222/agent-almanac/tree/main/i18n/caveman/skills/search-prior-art |
| license | MIT |
| version | 0.1.0 |
| execution_mode | open |
| jurisdiction | general |
| practice | ip |
| language | en |
Search Prior Art
Run structured prior art search to find publications, patents, products, disclosures predating specific invention. Used to assess patentability (can this be patented?), challenge validity (should this patent have been granted?), or establish freedom-to-operate (is this design covered by existing rights?).
When Use
- Evaluating whether invention is novel + non-obvious before filing patent
- Challenging validity of existing patent by finding prior art examiner missed
- Supporting freedom-to-operate analysis by finding prior art that limits blocking patent's scope
- Documenting defensive publication to prevent others from patenting concept
- Responding to patent office action that questions novelty or obviousness
Inputs
- Required: Invention description (what does, how works, what problem solves)
- Required: Search purpose (patentability, invalidity, FTO, defensive)
- Required: Critical date (filing date of patent app, or invention date for prior art)
- Optional: Known related patents or publications
- Optional: Tech classification codes (IPC, CPC)
- Optional: Key inventors or companies in field
Steps
Step 1: Decompose Invention into Searchable Elements
Break invention into constituent technical features.
- Read invention description (or patent claims if searching against existing patent)
- Extract essential elements — each independent technical feature.
- What components does it have?
- What steps does process follow?
- What technical effect does it achieve?
- What problem does it solve and how?
- Identify novel combination — what makes this different from known art.
- New element added to known elements?
- New combination of known elements?
- Known element applied in new field?
- Generate search terms per element.
- Technical terms, synonyms, abbreviations
- Broader + narrower terms (hierarchy)
- Alternative descriptions of same concept
- Document Search Map: elements, terms, relationships
Search Map Example:
+------------------+-----------------------------------+-----------+
| Element | Search Terms | Priority |
+------------------+-----------------------------------+-----------+
| Attention layer | attention mechanism, self- | High |
| | attention, multi-head attention | |
| Sparse routing | mixture of experts, sparse MoE, | High |
| | top-k routing, expert selection | |
| Training method | knowledge distillation, teacher- | Medium |
| | student, progressive training | |
+------------------+-----------------------------------+-----------+
