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Searching for U.S. provisional priority applications

Since 1995, the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) has offered inventors the option of filing a provisional application for a patent. Filing a provisional application provides an inventor with a way to establish an earlier effective filing date. Once the USPTO began issuing provisional application numbers, an overlap between numbers assigned to provisional applications and those assigned to non-provisional publications occurred creating duplicate numbers for different inventions, impairing retrieval and resulting in extraneous answers.

To provide a unique identity and to distinguish them from other unrelated patent publications with the same priority number, a P has been appended to existing U.S. provisional priority application numbers, e.g., US 1999-121903P, in the following files: USPATFULL, USPAT2, WPINDEX/WPIDS/WPIX, IFIPAT/IFICDB/IFIUDB, INPADOCDB, and the CA/CAplus^SM family of files.

 

To search for U.S. provisional priority application numbers, simply add
a P to the end of the US. priority application number and search it in the Priority Number (/PRN) field. The search results are displayed in the Priority Application Information (PRAI) field. If you are not sure of the U.S. provisional priority application number, EXPAND on the Priority Number (PRN) first.