Corresponding Cases and Citations

Slow: one EPO call per publication of every family member -- about a minute for a family of twenty publications. Runs in the background; progress is shown below. A very large family is read in batches.

Button 3 does what Button 2 does, then reads every US family member's own file at the USPTO: the PTO-892s (references the examiner cited) and the considered 1449s (IDS references the examiner initialled), each with the real mail date. Slower still: about half a minute to two minutes per US application, because the forms are scanned images read by OCR.

Button 4 does what Button 2 does, then reads every foreign family member's own office actions and search reports from the USPTO's Global Dossier (EP, JP and CN today): each cited patent reference with the date of the document that cited it, read from Global Dossier's English machine translation, the document's own text, or by OCR for scanned documents. A JP translation is checked against its original. Global Dossier's own citation list is compared too, and nothing it lists is dropped. From a few seconds to half a minute per family member.