Shown patent number a patent family

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Proton
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2020 9:55 am

Shown patent number a patent family

Post by Proton » Tue Dec 08, 2020 2:56 pm

Dear Team,

I have a question regarding a result list, which shows patent families. Is the shown patent number the number of the first registrated patent document of the family?

Best regards

Julia B.


Patent Information Marketing
Posts: 358
Joined: Fri Mar 03, 2017 1:16 pm

Re: Shown patent number a patent family

Post by Patent Information Marketing » Thu Dec 10, 2020 10:57 am

Dear Julia,

A dedicated algorithm in Espacenet tries to identify and display the best matching document of the simple patent family with regards to your search query. Therefore, the representative patent of the family, which is displayed in the result list, does not necessarily correspond to the earliest published or filed patent document of the family.

Please also note that the date behind the publication number in the result list corresponds to the publication date of the consulted publication. In a line below, you can also see earliest priority and earliest publication dates that correspond to documents within the family. If needed, you can find more details on family members corresponding to the consulted publication (e.g. publication numbers, kind codes, dates) by looking in the right column at the bibliographic view under “Published as” or at the patent family view.

If you are interested to only display earliest published filings at one or more offices in the result list, you can specify this in your search query accordingly, e.g. pn=EPA1 or pn=USA1.
Kind regards

Patent Information Marketing


Proton
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2020 9:55 am

Re: Shown patent number a patent family

Post by Proton » Sat Jan 02, 2021 5:30 pm

Thanks for your reply. It helped a lot.
Just to be sure, I would like to ask a further question:

In the result list there is just one representative patent shown of each simple patent family. So to say there is no possible way that two patents of the same simple patent family are shown both in the same result list. Am I right?

Thanks a lot. Best regards

Julia


Patent Information Marketing
Posts: 358
Joined: Fri Mar 03, 2017 1:16 pm

Re: Shown patent number a patent family

Post by Patent Information Marketing » Mon Jan 11, 2021 11:10 am

Dear Julia,
Indeed the result list originating from a search will show only one member of a simple patent family.

There are however rare circumstances when during the exploration of e.g. the citation tree two members of the same family can be moved to the result list. This can be due to the fact that different family members of the same family are citing the same document. Please find here one example that shows this behaviour: If click for the document pn=EP2910453A1 on >citations>citing documents and move them to the result list, you will see two documents (DE102016116857A1 and WO2018046252A1) of the same family in the list that cite this publication. When you select one of them both are selected to indicate that they belong to the same simple patent family. This is a rare occasion where the exploration (not initial search!) shows all family members for completeness reasons.

I hope you find this explanation helpful.
Kind regards

Patent Information Marketing


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