Prior Art Search
Search & Analysis · Interactive
Runs a prior-art and novelty search against a description of an invention. Covers patents, non-patent literature (scholarly and technical publications), and, for video-coding technology, technical-standards contribution documents.
What to expect: This runs as a short back-and-forth, not one shot. It checks in with you a handful of times: first on what it understood about your invention, then on how broad to search, the date to measure against, the filters, the exact search, and finally the results and format, so you can confirm or adjust before it goes further. Say “just run it” if you'd rather skip the check-ins and get a finished result with reasonable defaults.
| Argument | Type | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
invention_text | text (20–200,000 chars) | Yes, to start a new search | Description of the invention to search against |
corpus | one of: patent, npl, standards (default patent) | No | Which body of documents to search |
pnctry | list of text | No | Country codes to restrict to (patent corpus) |
prid_from / prid_to | text (date, YYYYMMDD) | No | Priority-date bounds (patent corpus) |
ad_from / ad_to | text (date, YYYYMMDD) | No | Filing-date bounds (patent corpus) |
pd_from / pd_to | text (date, YYYYMMDD) | No | Publication-date bounds (patent corpus) |
dedup_mode | one of: extended, simple, none (default extended) | No | How to de-duplicate by patent family |
expand_citations | true or false (default true) | No | Also search the citation graph of the strongest hits |
year_to / language / must_include | text | No | Literature-corpus filters (year, language, required term) |
standard / companies / meeting_from / meeting_to | text | No | Standards-corpus filters |
target_patents | list of patent numbers | No | The patents being challenged or assessed, up to 50. These and their family members are excluded from the results by default. If omitted, the tool attempts to identify the subject patent from the invention text |
exclude_self | true or false (default true) | No | Exclude the subject patent and its family from results. Set false only if you explicitly want them included |