Both the applicant and the patent examiner must find and cite documents that may anticipate the claimed invention, or might be similar to the claimed invention and limit the scope of the patent protection, or which generally reveal the state of the art of the technology. These are called reverse citations. From the perspective of the patents being cited, they are forward citations. Therefore, the number of forward citations a patent receives is often used as a measure of a patent's significance.

Here are a few things to remember about forward citations:

Documents that cite a patent are usually at least 12 months newer than the cited patent due to a lag in publishing of filed applications. As a result, patents that are filed about the same time as another similar patent will rarely cite each other.

Patent applications that receive a large amount of forward citations are generally cited by the same applicant.

New patents rarely earn many forward citations because it takes time for a patent to be recognized and cited by newer patent documents. In other words, forward citations build over time and a strict citation analysis will favor older patents.