This guide covers the basic steps of carrying out a Number Search for an invention, when you have a Publication Number available. Number search can be used for Opposition, Invalidity and State-of-the-Art search purposes, for example.

Via the Number Search you can select the Full Specification; All Claims; Claim # as your search input. These will search against the related Graphs to find related Prior Art. You are also able to select if you wish to run an Invalidity or State of the Art search.

Note: For brevity, the Graphs for Full Specification and All Claims will not be shown - as they are simply too long!

Best Practice Tip!

Searching via Full Specification brings, statistically speaking, the most novelty-destroying Prior Art (as labeled by human Examiners) to the highest ranks of the results. In addition, the hits are usually in the right technical area, i.e. have least amount of noise, as the AI has the whole context of the invention in use.

Searching via Individual Claims can find complementary hits, and in particular "accidental Prior Art", because then the AI focuses only on the claimed features. Due to the broad language of claims, and less context in use, there may also be more noise.

The basic steps of a Number search are:

1. Enter the Publication Number and select the relevant section you wish to search against (Full-Specification; All Claims; Claim #)

2. Review the search results

3. Mark the best findings as Favorites

4. Re-run the search using Zoom to Favorites

Additionally you can (but not covered in this guide):

The four steps are described in more detail and with screenshots below.

Select the desired document and confirm the section you wish to search against.

Confirm 'State of the Art' or 'Invalidity' and press Search Patents

Full Specification: Uses both the Claims and Description of the patent for the search. Ideal for searches around the overall subject matter of a particular publication. Statistically, returns the most accurate results in terms of examiner X citation recall.

All Claims: Uses every claim of the publication for the search. Does not pay attention to features mentioned only in the description. Ideal for searches with claim focus.

Claim #: Uses just the selected claim for the search. Independent Claims are shown, with the opportunity to expand down to Dependent Claims by clicking on the 'Claims 2-#' option shown below

Invalidity Search: Will search all results excluding any family members of the input, as well as any date past the users settings (which can be seen here)

State of the Art Search: Will find any result which matches the selected input, regardless of dates or family links.

Carry out at least two searches: one with Full specification and one with the Independent claim(s). This maximizes the chances of capturing the best Prior Art (see also previous Pest Practice tip).

IPRally provides many functionalities for processing the search results both inside the platform and by exporting data into another review platform.

The tool is self-explanatory when it comes to result analysis.

Using the Search Filters

The result list and any Examiner Citations:

Showing image mosaics:

Smart image viewer by clicking the mosaic images:

AI-based relevant passage highlighting:

If the closest prior art appears among the results of IPRally, you can click the heart symbol to make the hit a Favorite.

If, for some reason (yes, that happens 😊), the closest prior art is not among the hits of IPRally, you can manually enter the publication in the Favorites tab:

You are able to add multiple documents here as well:

We recommend using 1-5 best hits as favorites. Provided that they do not contain a lot of contradictory information, carrying out the next step (step 4) usually improves the quality of the search results. Please see our article on Zoom to Favorites for more guidance.

Toggling Zoom to Favorites on and pressing SEARCH PATENTS again, will utilize the Favorites information (together with the original graph) to find more relevant hits.

Note: you can track the new hits in the list using the VIEWED status of the hits (Blue: Un-Viewed / White: Viewed). You can easily 'hide viewed' under the View Options to only see which new results appear with the new search:

The viewed status changes also automatically, if you open the full document view.

Once you have re-run the search, get back to the analysis step 2 and repeat iteratively, if needed.

This process can be repeated with any Number Search - by selecting All Claims or any Individual Claim: