Matter Families can be complex entities having dozens of matters and perhaps 1000s of prior art references. AppColl provides a feature in the Prior Art module for downloading a Citation Matrix for a matter family and reviewing which references have been cited in which matters.
- Go to the Prior Art module.
- Select one or more Matters for which you wish to generate the matrix.
- Click the Export Citation Matrix button.
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Open the downloaded Spreadsheet. An example is shown below. Column A lists all the prior art references associated with at least one of the selected matters. Each column lists the selected matters. Down each column is the cross-references between each reference and the matter. For example, cell B24 shows that US-7000000-B1 was cited in an IDS on 2018-03-21 for matter AN-00001.
The following key explains the meaning of each possible value for any cell.
<blank> Reference is not linked to the matter
Uncited Reference is linked to the matter but has not been cited in IDS
Prev. Cited Reference is linked to the matter and has been cited to PTO, but the IDS was not created in AppColl.
IDS m/d/yy Reference is linked to the matter and has been cited in IDS generated through AppColl.
Exmnr m/d/yy Reference is linked to the matter and was cited by the examiner.
