Trademark Cited By

curl "https://api.signa.so/v1/trademarks/tm_8kLm2nPq/cited-by?limit=20" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SIGNA_API_KEY"

{
  "object": "list",
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "cit_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6e",
      "object": "citation",
      "office_code": "US",
      "application_ref": "98123456",
      "trademark": {
        "id": "tm_019f34d6-2000-7777-8888-000000000001",
        "mark_text": "ACME BREW",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "98123456",
        "registration_number": null,
        "status_primary": "pending"
      },
      "cited_ref": "5567890",
      "cited_ref_type": "registration",
      "cited_trademark": {
        "id": "tm_8kLm2nPq",
        "mark_text": "ACME",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "87999999",
        "registration_number": "5567890",
        "status_primary": "active"
      },
      "refusal_type": "2d",
      "action_date": "2026-01-15",
      "action_stage": "final",
      "disposition": "maintained",
      "disposition_as_of": "2026-08-30T13:30:00.000Z",
      "source_document_id": "med_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6e"
    },
    {
      "id": "cit_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6f",
      "object": "citation",
      "office_code": "US",
      "application_ref": "97654321",
      "trademark": {
        "id": "tm_019f34d6-3000-7777-8888-000000000002",
        "mark_text": "ACMEE",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "97654321",
        "registration_number": null,
        "status_primary": "inactive"
      },
      "cited_ref": "5567890",
      "cited_ref_type": "registration",
      "cited_trademark": null,
      "refusal_type": "2d",
      "action_date": "2025-06-02",
      "action_stage": "nonfinal",
      "disposition": "abandoned_after",
      "disposition_as_of": "2026-08-30T13:30:00.000Z",
      "source_document_id": "med_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c70"
    }
  ],
  "has_more": false,
  "pagination": { "cursor": null },
  "request_id": "req_cV2nL8pQ"
}

GET

trademarks

{id}

cited-by

curl "https://api.signa.so/v1/trademarks/tm_8kLm2nPq/cited-by?limit=20" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SIGNA_API_KEY"

{
  "object": "list",
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "cit_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6e",
      "object": "citation",
      "office_code": "US",
      "application_ref": "98123456",
      "trademark": {
        "id": "tm_019f34d6-2000-7777-8888-000000000001",
        "mark_text": "ACME BREW",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "98123456",
        "registration_number": null,
        "status_primary": "pending"
      },
      "cited_ref": "5567890",
      "cited_ref_type": "registration",
      "cited_trademark": {
        "id": "tm_8kLm2nPq",
        "mark_text": "ACME",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "87999999",
        "registration_number": "5567890",
        "status_primary": "active"
      },
      "refusal_type": "2d",
      "action_date": "2026-01-15",
      "action_stage": "final",
      "disposition": "maintained",
      "disposition_as_of": "2026-08-30T13:30:00.000Z",
      "source_document_id": "med_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6e"
    },
    {
      "id": "cit_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6f",
      "object": "citation",
      "office_code": "US",
      "application_ref": "97654321",
      "trademark": {
        "id": "tm_019f34d6-3000-7777-8888-000000000002",
        "mark_text": "ACMEE",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "97654321",
        "registration_number": null,
        "status_primary": "inactive"
      },
      "cited_ref": "5567890",
      "cited_ref_type": "registration",
      "cited_trademark": null,
      "refusal_type": "2d",
      "action_date": "2025-06-02",
      "action_stage": "nonfinal",
      "disposition": "abandoned_after",
      "disposition_as_of": "2026-08-30T13:30:00.000Z",
      "source_document_id": "med_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c70"
    }
  ],
  "has_more": false,
  "pagination": { "cursor": null },
  "request_id": "req_cV2nL8pQ"
}

When To Use This

Use this endpoint to measure how much of a blocker a mark is. Each row is one citation occurrence: this mark named as the prior right in one office action against one application. This is the outbound direction, so the marks in trademark are other people’s applications, and the mark in the path is the reference the examiner reached for. It answers questions a search index cannot: whether the office has actually treated this mark as a bar, how often, how recently, and whether those refusals stuck.

Rows are citation occurrences, not applications. One application cited in both a nonfinal and a final office action produces two rows for the same mark. To count distinct applications, group by trademark.id, falling back to application_ref when trademark is null. A raw row count overstates how many applications this mark has blocked.

For the inbound direction, the prior marks cited against this application, use Trademark Citations.

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.

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.

Rows Matched By Reference

Examiners cite an application or registration number. Signa resolves that number to a mark on the register at extraction time, but some rows never resolve: the cited number may belong to a mark Signa does not hold, or the mark may have been ingested after its citations were extracted. This endpoint returns those rows too. It matches on the resolved link, and additionally on this mark’s own application and registration numbers for unlinked citations from the same office, so a citation that names your number is returned even when the extraction pipeline never linked it. On such a row cited_trademark is null and cited_ref carries the number the examiner printed. Treat cited_trademark: null as “matched by reference only”, not as a missing field. Dropping those rows undercounts how often the mark has been used as a bar.

Path Parameters

string

required

Trademark ID (tm_...). This is the cited prior mark.

Query Parameters

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.

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.

integer

default:"20"

Page size (1-100).

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.

Response

The object is identical to the one returned by Trademark Citations, read in the other direction: trademark is the citing application and cited_trademark is the mark in the path, or null on a reference-matched row.

string

Always list.

object[]

Show Citation object

string

Citation ID (cit_...).

string

Always citation.

string | null

Office that issued the action, uppercase ST.3 (e.g. US).

string

Application number the office action was issued against, as printed by the office.

object | null

Summary of the citing application (id, mark_text, office_code, application_number, registration_number, status_primary). null when the citation carries no persisted link to a Signa record for that application, which is not the same as the application being absent from the register: resolution runs once, at extraction time.

string

The reference the examiner cited. On this endpoint it is this mark’s application or registration number.

string

Whether cited_ref is a registration or an application number.

object | null

Summary of the cited mark. null on a row matched by reference only, as described above.

string

Office-local refusal ground. 2d is the USPTO §2(d) likelihood-of-confusion ground.

string | null

ISO date of the office action (YYYY-MM-DD).

string | null

nonfinal or final. This is the stage the citation reached, not provenance about source_document_id. A citation first raised in a nonfinal action reads final once a later dated final action maintained the refusal, so final does not mean the row was extracted from a final action.

string | null

How the citation resolved. See Disposition Values. null while pending the daily refresh.

string | null

ISO 8601 timestamp of when the current disposition was first derived or last changed. It does not advance when a daily run re-derives the same value, so a stale-looking timestamp means the disposition has been stable.

string | null

The office action the citation was extracted from (med_...), retrievable through Trademark Documents on the citing mark. Every citation served today carries one. The field is nullable so a citation derived without a stored source document can be represented. Documents are only addressable under a trademark, so when trademark is null there is no route that resolves this id.

boolean

Whether more rows are available.

object

Cursor for the next page.

string

Unique request identifier for support and debugging.

Example Request

curl "https://api.signa.so/v1/trademarks/tm_8kLm2nPq/cited-by?limit=20" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SIGNA_API_KEY"

Example Response

The second row was matched by reference: the examiner cited registration 5567890, and that citation is returned even though the extraction pipeline never linked it to a record.

{
  "object": "list",
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "cit_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6e",
      "object": "citation",
      "office_code": "US",
      "application_ref": "98123456",
      "trademark": {
        "id": "tm_019f34d6-2000-7777-8888-000000000001",
        "mark_text": "ACME BREW",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "98123456",
        "registration_number": null,
        "status_primary": "pending"
      },
      "cited_ref": "5567890",
      "cited_ref_type": "registration",
      "cited_trademark": {
        "id": "tm_8kLm2nPq",
        "mark_text": "ACME",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "87999999",
        "registration_number": "5567890",
        "status_primary": "active"
      },
      "refusal_type": "2d",
      "action_date": "2026-01-15",
      "action_stage": "final",
      "disposition": "maintained",
      "disposition_as_of": "2026-08-30T13:30:00.000Z",
      "source_document_id": "med_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6e"
    },
    {
      "id": "cit_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c6f",
      "object": "citation",
      "office_code": "US",
      "application_ref": "97654321",
      "trademark": {
        "id": "tm_019f34d6-3000-7777-8888-000000000002",
        "mark_text": "ACMEE",
        "office_code": "US",
        "application_number": "97654321",
        "registration_number": null,
        "status_primary": "inactive"
      },
      "cited_ref": "5567890",
      "cited_ref_type": "registration",
      "cited_trademark": null,
      "refusal_type": "2d",
      "action_date": "2025-06-02",
      "action_stage": "nonfinal",
      "disposition": "abandoned_after",
      "disposition_as_of": "2026-08-30T13:30:00.000Z",
      "source_document_id": "med_0198c2f1-7e2a-7b34-9c11-3d5f8a2b4c70"
    }
  ],
  "has_more": false,
  "pagination": { "cursor": null },
  "request_id": "req_cV2nL8pQ"
}

Code Examples

curl -G "https://api.signa.so/v1/trademarks/tm_8kLm2nPq/cited-by" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sig_YOUR_KEY_HERE" \
  --data-urlencode "disposition=maintained,abandoned_after" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=20"

import { Signa } from "@signa-so/sdk";

const signa = new Signa({ api_key: process.env.SIGNA_API_KEY });

const citedBy = await signa.trademarks.citedBy("tm_8kLm2nPq", { limit: 20 });

for (const citation of citedBy.data) {
  // `trademark` is the application that was refused over this mark.
  const blocked = citation.trademark?.mark_text ?? citation.application_ref;
  console.log(citation.action_date, blocked, citation.disposition);
}

import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://api.signa.so/v1/trademarks/tm_8kLm2nPq/cited-by",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer sig_YOUR_KEY_HERE"},
    params={"disposition": "maintained,abandoned_after", "limit": 20},
)

Errors

Status	Type	Description
400	`validation_error`	Malformed `id` (not a prefixed ID), unknown query parameter, or bad enum value
400	`id_type_mismatch`	`id` is a well-formed ID of another type (e.g. `own_...`) rather than a `tm_...`
400	`cursor_expired`	Cursor is blank, expired, or was issued for a different endpoint
401	`unauthorized`	Missing or invalid API key
403	`forbidden`	API key lacks the `trademarks:read` scope
404	`not_found`	Trademark ID does not exist
429	`rate_limited`	Rate limit exceeded

Trademark Citations: prior marks cited against this application
Search Citations: cross-mark citation query with office, date, and disposition filters
Retrieve Trademark: parent mark detail
Use Case: Trademark Clearance: where citation history fits in a clearance workflow

Overview

Trademarks

Parties

Records

Intelligence

Filing & docketing

Monitoring

Analytics

Reference

Administration

SDK

When To Use This

Freshness

Rows Matched By Reference

Path Parameters

Query Parameters

Response

Example Request

Example Response

Code Examples

Errors

​When To Use This

​Freshness

​Rows Matched By Reference

​Path Parameters

​Query Parameters

​Response

​Example Request

​Example Response

​Code Examples

​Errors

​Related Endpoints

When To Use This

Freshness

Rows Matched By Reference

Path Parameters

Query Parameters

Response

Example Request

Example Response

Code Examples

Errors

Related Endpoints