Search Services:

Author Tracing

A common component of our Validity Ultimate™ service, author tracing is a unique method of prior art searching that seeks to reconstruct a timeline of scientific discovery.

At its simplest, author tracing first begins with the analysis of publications written by a particular scientist or individual of interest, and then branches out by investigating scientific collaborators and their body of work around similar time-frames. It can be an invaluable means of finding prior art of interest, because it exposes connections between authors, inventors, or teams of scientists and their published materials and institutions where they worked.

With our searchers’ advanced level of author tracing expertise, we can produce highly
meaningful results by:

“Spidering” around the points on a designated timeline to follow paths leading from key events or publications.
Tracing associated collaborators.
Focusing on archives at specific institutions within defined date ranges.
Uncovering obscure sources of ‘gray literature’ that have never been mentioned in mainstream
secondary literature publications or databases.

Author tracing -- just another example of how our methods and expertise can give an unparalleled level of depth to your search and help us achieve the task we do best - finding prior art where others cannot.