Before getting into the details of Prior-Art searching, it’s important to understand the motivation behind performing prior art searching.

If you wish to have a patent on your idea, the conditions of patentability must be met. For a patent to be granted on your invention, the invention must be novel, non-obvious and useful. Novelty and Non-obviousness of an invention can be judged based on the prior arts.

Prior art is publicly available disclosure or any evidence which indicates that claimed invention is already known. A prior art can be a patent, thesis, research publications, articles, blogs, audio, image, videos, books, etc.

After a patent application is filed, the patent application is examined at the patent office. This is a standard practice followed by all the jurisdictions. At the time of patent examination, one of the most important aspects which is judged by the examiner is the novelty & non-obvious of the claimed invention. A detailed prior art search is performed on the claimed invention to identify prior arts by the examiner. If examiner finds any relevant prior art for the claimed invention, a rejection notice is issued for the claimed invention. The applicant then must respond to the rejection notice, either by modifying the claim of invention or by respectfully arguing on the rejection. Each office action leads to additional expense and delay in the process of grant of patent application.

Hence, it becomes important for an applicant to properly review the claimed invention before filing. If a prior-art search is performed on the proposed invention, the patent inventor can decide the required modifications in the claimed invention based on the identified prior-art(s). Accordingly, the claims of the patent applications may be drafted. This step may significantly reduce the possibility of rejections at the examination stage leading to saving of time and money.