Patent Families in Reaxys

What is a patent family?

A patent family is a collection of related patent applications that is covering the same or similar technical content[1]. The applications in a family are related to each other through priority claims. Since patent protection is territorial, inventors must seek IP protection with different patent offices. The same invention will also be described in patents with same patent number but with different kind codes.

There are different ways to group and define a patent family. Here are some examples of patent family definitions: simple and extended patent families, domestic or national patent families.

Patent family information in Reaxys

Reaxys is using the “extended patent family” from Lexis Nexis, which is similar to the INPADOC patent family.  

Definition of the extended patent family: This patent family includes a set of patent documents filed in multiple countries that are directly or indirectly linked to one root document. The relation is based on a shared priority number extended to include other related documents, such as provisional, continuation or divisional applications. The calculation for the extended family priority includes the related documents and uses the earliest filing date as the priority date.

Grouping document results by patent family

On the document results page patents that share the same patent family are clustered into one group and only one patent being shown. The other patents from this family that are part of the result list can be easily expanded, see screenshot below (1)

The patent that is shown as representative of the family group is the one that has undergone most processing in Reaxys, meaning that this is the manually processed patent from this family, i.e. that substances, reactions, properties, targets are extracted if applicable, then this patent will be shown as top of the cluster. This patent is the one most enriched with detailed information.

If no patent was manually processed, then the patent from a major patent office or a newer one will be shown on top.

In order to view all members of patent family in Reaxys, irrespective of the search executed, a sub-search can be triggered. (2)

Additionally, there is still the option to access a list of patent family members via the bibliography information (3)

1 https://link.epo.org/web/Patent_Families_at_the_EPO_en.pdf