Reference
Patent & Trademark Examination Workflow glossary
Terms used in Patent & Trademark Examination Workflow and its documentation.
Applies to Patent & Trademark Examination Workflow as it works today. Moraph updates the platform continuously, and this page is reviewed when it changes.
Terms used in Patent & Trademark Examination Workflow and its documentation.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Prior art | Patent documents and other publications that may show a claimed invention was already known. |
| Cited reference | A document or mark the examiner recorded from their own search, with their relevance decision. |
| Relied on | The stage of a cited reference the examiner relies on in an office action. |
| Effective filing date | The earliest effective filing or priority date of a patent application; references dated on or after it are flagged for checking. |
| Office action | A communication from the examiner to the applicant, drafted here from a template and issued through the office's case system. |
| Response period | The months the applicant has to respond to an action, set by a product administrator for each action type. |
| Unpublished application | An application visible only to its examiner, its examination team and product administrators. |
| Examination team | The people besides the examiner who may open an unpublished application. |
| Search record | One search the examiner, a specialist or the office's search tool ran, kept as part of the application's search history. |
| Claim chart | The application's claim elements set against the passages of the references relied on. |
| Suggestion | A reference the office's search tool sent through the Work API, waiting for the examiner's decision. |
| Quality review | A review of an application's search and office action by someone other than its examiner. |
| Sound code | A Soundex code of a mark after folding common spellings, used as an aid to spot marks that sound alike; not a similarity decision. |
| Claim treatment | What an office action does with each claim (rejected, objected to, allowed, withdrawn from consideration or cancelled), recorded by the examiner and compared with the application's pending claims. |
| Form paragraph | A numbered paragraph of your office's approved text that an examiner adds to a draft office action. |
| Interview | A discussion with the applicant or their representative about an application, recorded with its substance and outcome and locked once made of record. |
| Notice of references cited | The list of references cited with an office action: those relied on, and those considered but not relied on. |
| Extension | A later response due date recorded on an issued office action with the reason, kept with the earlier date. |
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