Patent Citation: The Inventor, Examiner, Application, Differences USPTO - Case Report: Patent No. - 4,237,224

Abstract

Over the past few years, several studies have criticized examination procedures at both the United States Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO). Criticism focused particularly on differences between examiners and inventors regarding the patent-citation process. Patent citation is a highly important field in assisting different communities to understand the various phenomena in economics, technology, and the social world that might impact on them. Earlier, we explored citation differences between the examiner and the inventor before and after 2001 and then showed the citation results that might be obtained from the new database. This article analyzes a patent case to illustrate how to discover these citation differences. We reveal examiner and inventor patent-citation differences, as well as the influence of the new USPTO application data on patent-citation results.