Review Cited References

After you have reviewed patents that are relevant to your invention, the next step in the multi-step strategy is to review cited references.

You may be familiar with cited references from your reading of journal articles. When you read a journal article, you can often use the bibliography at the end of the article to find additional articles that can help you with your research. You can also sometimes use resources like Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar to also learn about articles that cited the article you are reading. You can use this approach when searching for additional patents, as well.

Beginning with the Espacenet record for the patent that you selected, find the Citations tab.

 

 

Clicking on the Citations tab will lead you to list of both "Cited documents" and "Citing documents," both discussed on the previous page.

Find the Espacenet records for these documents by simply clicking on the document numbers displayed on the Citations tab, and repeat the review of documents that you employed in previous steps of your search strategy.