Patent prior art searches

Prior art searches are really important to avoid "reinventing the wheel", infringement to third parties rights, but also to write a better patent application, to speed up the prosecution of an application, to find out the most recent inventions and to study technological trends.

There are many type of searches:

• informative
• patentability
• validity (opposition)
• legal status 
• freedom to operate (FTO)

The scope of a patent search is to find documents that claim similar technical features and not a mere match of words.

Patent searches can be carried out by:

• keywords
• classification symbols (IPC, CPC codes)
• citations