Finding patents missed by conventional watching

Patent watching services are increasingly common, with a number of these services based on watching new forward citations from the patent you are watching.

Here at Ambercite we believe that patent citations are very helpful - but by themselves are only half the story. Instead we need to combine citations using advanced algorithms in smart ways to both rank them in an order of predicted similarity - and also to find similar patents that have not yet been listed as a forward citation, but probably should be.

In other words, we think our clients want to be as well informed as possible, and more informed than their competitors. And we also know that our clients want to be able to do this as easily as possible.

Luckily,, in Ambercite, our clients can have all of the above.

Let us illustrate this with a case study. I am going to take a patent that has been asserted against the billion dollar drug Keytruda, being US8779105. This patent, filed by Bristols Myer Squib, is thought to have been the basis of a patent infringement worth hundreds of million of dollars.

If I was the patent manager for this patent, I will be interested to see who else is filing similar patents, say published in the last three years. In Ambercite, this is a very simple query:

When I ran this search on 8 May 2020, it returned a list of 101 patents, of which 29 were ‘known’ citations, and 72 are ‘unknown’ citations, i.e not previously recognised as a forward citation, but predicted to be relevant to US8779105.

The results of this search can be found here. This link was created using the Share Results button found in Ambercite.

So, already our smart patent manager is ahead - using a simple search, they have quickly found a list of known and previously unknown patents filed for similar products.

Watching for search updates

However - the patent manager will also be interested in efficiently looking for changes in this citation landscape.

And in Ambercite this is also very fast and easy. As an example of this, we are looking going to look for changes in the citation landscape after the monthly change in the patent landscape.

This process is remarkably simple. We simply take the link from above, open it up, and run a new search (‘Find Similar Patents’) with the ‘Show Only New’ patents selected, as shown below.

This will produce a list of 20 new results, all being patents added during the last data update. Of note, only 6 of these patents are known citations - so the other 14 patents are both new and relevant - and not picked up by conventional citation watching.

How to watch for the next update.

To watch for the next update, simple create an updated share link from the new set of results, save this somewhere, - and in about a months time run through the same process, i.e. run a new search from the link above.

Can we do this with a portfolio of patents?

Ambercite can run with up to 200 query patents. So to repeat this process for up to 200 patents, simply enter them into the Ambercite search box, and run the above process.

For a larger portfolio of patents, you may need to take advantage of our API. Please contact us for the details of this, and some suggestions of how you could automate this process.

Are all of these newly reported results recently published?

New results in Ambercite will come from both recently published results - AND - earlier published results which are now connected to the patents in the search box via new citation links, either directly or indirectly - i.e. the patent citation network is always growing over time.

How does this compare with conventional patent watching services?

Most of these are based on watching for known citations, which can miss relevant patents, or sometimes for new patents filed by known competitors, or in particular patent classes.

Watching for known citations (only ) can miss relevant patents. Watching for new patents by particular competitors can be helpful if the competitor is tightly focused on your area of interest, but can be less helpful if the competitor files in many different areas of technology. Watching in particular patent classes can bring up a lot of not relevant patents.

In contrast, Ambercite watching is both more comprehensive than citation watching, and can be more targeted than other types of watching - so providing a very useful and efficient way to watch patents.

We suggest that you try Ambercite today.