Application continuity and priority sensitivity
This is a bounded follow-up to the frozen Arkansas-inventor 2015–2025 utility-document cohort. It does not count distinct inventions or determine legal patent families or priority entitlement.
The cohort contains 10,678 source documents and 7,288 US applications. Official selective-field ODP searches returned 7,288 cohort applications; 0 remain unmatched. Retained parent-expansion inputs cover 12,172 requested applications in 126 hashed batches. All API inputs retain canonical requests, acquisition timestamps and hashes; no inventor/contact fields were requested. The event window remains frozen through December 2025; continuity assertions are a separately dated October 2026 acquisition.
Policy sensitivity
| Included links | Groups touching selected applications | Applications in groups with >1 selected application | Complete observed ancestry applications |
|---|---|---|---|
| continuation_division | 5,592 | 2,796 | 7,175 |
| plus_cip | 5,282 | 3,204 | 7,100 |
| plus_provisional | 5,255 | 3,174 | 7,172 |
| plus_cip_provisional | 5,098 | 3,391 | 7,096 |
| plus_cip_provisional_national_stage | 5,097 | 3,393 | 6,372 |
What this changes in the report
The existing application count is a useful event-window participation baseline. Explicit lineages show how much of that baseline belongs to connected filing programmes under alternative relationship policies. Report that sensitivity beside volume instead of treating each application or grant as a separate invention.
Keep continuations/divisions separate from continuation-in-part sensitivity: a CIP can introduce new matter, so connecting a CIP does not establish identical inventive content or entitlement to every ancestral date. Sharing a provisional also does not establish equivalent claimed subject matter. National-stage relationships enter only the fifth, broadest policy. Reissue, substitution, unclassified and contradictory typed relationships remain withheld from grouping. External PCT nodes retain their original identifiers; they are not converted into invented US serials.
Earliest observed dates and five-year maturity flags describe the composition of the selected event window. They do not provide a complete historical filing cohort: older applications without a selected 2015–2025 event are outside the sampling frame, and recent filings may not yet be public or granted. A true priority-cohort trend needs a separately defined, geography-consistent historical application universe. No innovation decline, grant-conversion rate, commercialization, economic impact or new ARA ranking is inferred.
The audit quarantines 63 contradictory relationship pairs across the retrieved edge set, of which 53 fall within the selected ancestral closure; 0 ancestral pairs have a parent date later than a child date and are also withheld. 5,764 collateral/later-descendant edges are excluded from grouping so later filings cannot bridge otherwise separate older programmes. PatentsView and ODP differ on observed filing dates for 488 selected applications; these source/date concepts remain separate. ODP-internal date conflicts remain unresolved. No parent bag means no parent relation was recorded in that retrieved response, not proof of no related application. Complete observed ancestry describes only the retrieved policy graph, not a legally complete family.
Ancestral records extend outside the event window and Arkansas. Their geography is not reassigned to Arkansas merely because a selected descendant has an Arkansas inventor. Unknown API matches, external parent references, missing dates, conflicting dates and cycle-affected regions remain explicit coverage limits.
Reproduce with a new output directory containing a copy of inputs/continuity-api and the same CLI without --acquire. A completed manifest refuses overwrite; use a new run ID for changed sources or policies. The initial v1/v2 diagnostics are preserved. V3 separates date semantics, quarantines contradictory/temporally inconsistent edges and restricts grouping to the selected ancestor closure.