How should U.S. patents and patent application publications be listed in an IDS?
U.S. patents and U.S. patent application publications must be listed separately from other documents in an Information Disclosure Statement (IDS). This requirement is specified in 37 CFR 1.98(a)(1).
The MPEP states: ‘37 CFR 1.98(a)(1) specifically requires that U.S. patents and U.S. patent application publications be listed separately from the citations of other documents. The separation of citations will permit the Office to obtain the U.S. patent numbers and the U.S. patent application publication numbers by optical character recognition (OCR) from the scanned documents such that the documents can be made available electronically to the examiner to facilitate searching and retrieval of the cited U.S. patents and U.S. patent application publications from the Office’s search databases.‘
To comply with this requirement, applicants can use forms PTO/SB/08, which provide a separate section for listing U.S. patents and U.S. patent application publications. If not using these forms, ensure that U.S. patents and U.S. patent application publications are listed in a separate section from other documents.
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