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GET

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When To Use This

Use this endpoint when you are looking at one application and need to know what the examiner put in its way. Each row is one prior mark cited in one office action against this application, with the stage the citation reached and how it ultimately resolved. This is the inbound direction. For the outbound direction, the applications this mark was cited against, use Trademark Cited By.
Rows are citation occurrences, not prior marks. One prior mark cited in both a nonfinal and a final office action produces two rows. To count the distinct marks standing in this application’s way, group by cited_trademark.id, falling back to cited_ref when cited_trademark is null. A raw row count overstates how many prior marks the examiner raised.
Coverage today is USPTO only. Citations are extracted from USPTO office actions and cover §2(d) likelihood-of-confusion refusals. Other offices return an empty list. Check capabilities.citations on List Offices to see the state of any office programmatically, rather than inferring coverage from an empty response.

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Freshness

Citations are extracted hourly from stored office actions. Dispositions are recomputed once a day, so a newly extracted citation carries disposition: null until the next daily refresh, which can be up to about 24 hours. A disposition can also change on a later run as prosecution continues. disposition_as_of is stamped when the current disposition was first derived or last changed, and deliberately does not move when a daily run re-derives the same value. An unchanged timestamp means the disposition has been stable, not that the refresh stopped running.

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Path Parameters

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string
required
Trademark ID (tm_...). This is the citing application, the mark the office action was issued against.

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Query Parameters

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string
Filter by how the citation resolved, comma-separated. One or more of citation_issued, maintained, withdrawn, abandoned_after, published. Rows whose disposition has not been computed yet are excluded when this filter is supplied.
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string
Filter by the stage the citation reached, comma-separated. One or both of nonfinal, final. final includes citations first raised in a nonfinal action that a later final action maintained.
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integer
default:"20"
Page size (1-100).
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string
Opaque cursor from the previous response’s pagination.cursor.
Results are ordered by action_date descending, newest first, with undated actions last and id as the final tiebreaker. The order is fixed: there is no sort parameter.

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Response

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string
Always list.
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object[]
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boolean
Whether more citations are available.
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object
Cursor for the next page.
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string
Unique request identifier for support and debugging.

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Disposition Values

A citation carries exactly one disposition, derived from this application’s prosecution events and from whether the citation reappeared in subsequent office actions. The disposition is one verdict per (application, cited reference) pair. It is computed across that pair’s whole occurrence history and then written onto every occurrence row for the pair. It is not per row, and it is not per date. action_stage does vary from row to row, but it records the stage that occurrence of the citation reached, not the kind of document the row was extracted from: a citation first raised in a nonfinal action is upgraded to final once a later dated final action maintains the refusal, so a final row can still carry a nonfinal source_document_id. disposition is per pair and describes the citation’s fate overall. So a row with action_stage: nonfinal alongside disposition: maintained is expected, not a data error. It means a different occurrence of this same citation, against the same application, reached a final action. Filter action_stage=final if you want the occurrences that reached final, remembering that those rows include upgraded ones whose source_document_id is a nonfinal action; read disposition from any row of the pair if you want the pair’s outcome. published and abandoned_after are evaluated against the pair’s earliest office action date rather than against the individual row’s date, which is another reason every row of a pair carries the same answer. When more than one signal applies, the strongest one wins, in this order: published, maintained, abandoned_after, withdrawn, citation_issued. A mark that was cited, refused to final, and then abandoned reads maintained, because a refusal held to final is the more informative fact. The action_stage and the mark’s own status remain on the record for anyone who needs the detail.

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Example Request

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Example Response

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Code Examples

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Counting Without Listing

Retrieve Trademark returns citations_count for the same set of rows. 0 means the office is covered and this mark has no citations. null means citations are not counted for that office at all, which is not the same as “no citations exist”. Use capabilities.citations on List Offices to tell the two apart.

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Errors