A patent family is a group of patents that typically relate to the same invention, prosecuted in different countries.
All the members of a patent family usually share a common priority date, i.e., the date when the inventor(s) filed the first patent application of the family, also called the parent application.
Sometimes members of a patent family can be more complex in their relationships to each other, compared to the simple example of a single priority application that results in several other national applications. These include continuation applications or divisional applications and these may even claim multiple priority dates. These latter set of applications are beyond the scope of this paper.
Identified in bibliographic data (‘‘Also published as:’’) field in Espacenet.
EXAMPLE: Zinc Finger Nuclease (targeted mutagenesis) in plants
PatentScope & Escapenet patent search summation (Keyword & Code)
Derived from PubMed literature review.