Citations_search_oa_citations_minimal

Search Office Action Citations (v2) for high-volume discovery (8 key fields).

OA Citations v2 is the raw citation list transcribed from Form PTO-892 (examiner) and Form PTO-1449 (applicant IDS). Usually broader than the enriched lane in bulk (measured TC2100: 4.87M vs 4.32M records), with most of the surplus being applicant IDS references — but NOT a superset: on a given application the enriched lane can return more (measured: app 12849948 returns 4 here vs 8 enriched). For any completeness-sensitive question, run BOTH lanes and union the results.

⚠️ APPLICANT-CITED (1449/IDS) COVERAGE IS PARTIAL. This lane is documented upstream as transcribing Form 892 AND Form 1449, but on IDS-heavy files it returns close to what the examiner applied and little else, in every era. Measured against the patents' own References Cited pages (union of BOTH lanes): US 7,971,071 -> 5 of 91 US 9,496,922 -> 1 of 251 US 9,135,462 -> 0 of about 620 (both lanes return zero) US 11,656,067 -> 3 of 15, prosecuted 2021-2023 INSIDE the documented window, and all three are the examiner's own double-patenting family citations, none of them the twelve references a later IPR petition relied on. Treat a reference's absence here as NO evidence that the applicant did not disclose it, and never present a count from this lane as the applicant's full IDS. For a complete 1449 record, read the IDS documents themselves through the PFW MCP.

Key fields returned: patentApplicationNumber, groupArtUnitNumber, techCenter, referenceIdentifier, parsedReferenceIdentifier, actionTypeCategory, examinerCitedReferenceIndicator, createDateTime. The OA API ignores fl, so this set is enforced client-side — the tier really does return only these eight. The PFW hand-off is stated once on the response envelope as pfw_link, not repeated on every row. legalSectionCode and paragraphNumber are NOT here; use the balanced tier or pass an explicit fields list for them.

CROSS-LANE JOIN KEY: every row carries referenceKey, the normalised reference identifier, and it is the ONLY correct key for unioning this lane with the enriched lane. The two lanes write the same reference differently: on app 12849948 this lane's parsedReferenceIdentifier reads '20060075466' while the enriched citedDocumentIdentifier reads 'US 2006/0075466 A1'. Joining those two raw fields finds zero overlap on every application; the true answer there is four references in both lanes. referenceKey is digits only (a leading US, spaces, slashes, hyphens and the kind code stripped, series markers such as RE kept), derived from parsedReferenceIdentifier first and the raw referenceIdentifier second, and carried on both lanes at every tier including a custom fields list. It is null on a row whose identifier does not reduce to a document number, which is an unjoinable row rather than a missing one.

Solr/Lucene Query Examples:

• By application: criteria='patentApplicationNumber:18180061'

• By tech center: criteria='techCenter:2100'

• By art unit: criteria='groupArtUnitNumber:2854'

• Examiner-cited only: criteria='examinerCitedReferenceIndicator:true'

• Statutory basis (OA-ONLY capability): criteria='techCenter:2100 AND legalSectionCode:103'

• Where a patent was cited: criteria='parsedReferenceIdentifier:9280610'

⚠️ NO DATE FIELD. officeActionDate does not exist here and returns HTTP 400 — the index already IS the 2017-10-01+ window, so omit any date clause. createDateTime is an ETL load stamp, NOT the office action date — never present it as prosecution chronology.

⚠️ publicationNumber IN criteria IS A DELIBERATE 400 HERE, AND THAT IS A FEATURE. The raw upstream API does not reject that field: it answers HTTP 200 with numFound 0, which reads exactly like "this patent was never cited" and is silently wrong. This server refuses the clause instead so the mistake is visible. Use the patent_number parameter, which crosswalks a granted patent number to the application serial this index does hold, or query parsedReferenceIdentifier to find where a patent was CITED.

⚠️ Use parsedReferenceIdentifier (normalized) rather than referenceIdentifier for reference lookups — the raw string format varies for the same patent.

IDENTIFIERS: application_number is the APPLICATION serial. This index has no patent-number field (publicationNumber returns HTTP 400), so patent_number is crosswalked here: pass a GRANTED patent number (7-8 digits; commas, spaces and a US prefix accepted) and it is resolved to its application serial with one USPTO ODP applications-search call, then queried as patentApplicationNumber. The response reports the mapping in patent_number_resolution {input, interpreted_as, resolved_application_number, source}. An 11-digit pre-grant publication number is refused here (use Citations_search_citations_minimal for those), an unresolvable number is a 400 naming the accepted forms, and a patent_number that disagrees with a supplied application_number is a 400 rather than a query that can only return zero.

Use Citations_search_oa_citations_balanced for full 16-field detail (adds legalSectionCode, paragraphNumber, parsedReferenceIdentifier). For passage locations, claim mapping, NPL flags, or date filtering, use Citations_search_citations_minimal — and run it alongside this tool by default. Coverage: USPTO documents both APIs as office actions mailed 2017-10-01 to ~30 days ago; in practice both have been observed serving older records, so do not treat an older application as out of scope without querying. Routing detail: Citations_get_guidance(section='oa_citations').