A Patent Application Is Not A Journal Article Or A Project Plan

From time to time an inventor wants to facilitate the drafting process by providing a journal article or business plan that outlines the inventive subject matter. Such documents are of limited use.

Journal articles are usually drafted to show that the author's work is consistent with accepted science, and is merely an extension of what everyone already knew. If an article were drafted otherwise, there is very little chance that it would be published in any respected peer-reviewed journal. Unfortunately, that is exactly the opposite of what is needed in a patent application. In the field of patents, the goal is to point out that the work is completely non-obvious, and even better, is inconsistent with the accepted wisdom.

The focus of a project plan is also entirely wrong for a patent application. A project plan focuses on what will be done, and what results the experimenter or project leader hopes to find. That is all future oriented. In a patent application the focus should be on what has already been accomplished, either in past experiments or at least in mental conception.

Both journal articles and project plans also differ from patent applications in technical respects. Release level, release date and so forth are completely irrelevant to a patent application. Authorship is irrelevant as well, since a patent application needs to identify inventors, not authors. Confidentiality statements are both unnecessary and inappropriate, since patent applications are published. Still further, patent applications don't have a table of contents, introduction, purpose and scope, goals, revision history, etc. And although some patent attorneys use a glossary, the usual practice in a patent application is to define terms within the body of the text.