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An issued patent is the end-product of the patent prosecution process, during which there is generally some give and take between the inventors and the Examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to put an application in condition to be issued. An application will be issued after it is examined by an Examiner who has the sufficient technical skill to be able to understand and evaluate the invention. The Examiner performs a prior art search, looking for existing patents and publications (both patent and non-patent publications) that may have existed prior to the filing of the application being examined. Part of the trade-off in being granted a patent is that the subject matter described in the patent be new, novel, and non-obvious. These last two terms have significant importance in the patent process, and the prior art search is used to determine whether an invention is novel based on existing references and whether it is not obvious (e.g., not a modification or combination that would be obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made) in view of those references.

A published patent application is an application that has not yet necessarily been examined. While this is most often the case, there are likely to be a few instances where examination has begun when an application is published. A published application is not the same as an issued patent. The key advantage to publishing pending applications is that the published application serves notice to would-be infringers of the invention that there are claims to the invention. It is important to note that a published application is not the same as an issued patent. Also, not all patent applications have to be published. If patent protection is not sought outside of the U.S., the application can be kept confidential.