Hi PatentsView community,

I am searching for data on when a citation was added to an application throughout the application process to disentangle the citations initially included in an application from those subsequently added during the process. According to the USPTO Patent Center the data should exist. According to the data dictionary, this should be captured, for example, by the citations_date variable in the g_us_application_citation dataset:

When I look at the content of the variable, however, it rather seems as if this related to the date the cited patent (citation_id) was granted. This would be similar to the definition of citations_date variable in the g_us_patent_citation dataset. 

Has anyone here worked with these variables and can shed some light on this? Any insight would be much appreciated. 

Thanks and best regards,

Chris