Prior citings

Prior art, for the purposes of searching for non-patent literature, can be defined as any publication or even sale of goods prior to a critical date involved with an application for a patent. This critical date can be one year before application for a US patent or one day prior to application to other patent authorities. Many practitioners dutifully search the patent literature to find prior art because it is easily accessible, relatively inexpensive, fairly extensive and provides easily identifiable dates.