The reference part of the dependent claim.

According to Chapter 2 of Part II of Patent Examination Guide (20 10), the conditions of "citation" of subordinate claims should at least be: positive citation, selective citation and repeated non-citation. The purpose of "quoting" the subordinate claims is to make the claims concise and clear. The question here is whether it is acceptable to write the affiliation in other ways than the above quotation, but it does not lead to the defect of "not concise and unclear" in the claim. First of all, introduce the above citation method.

(1) "Forecited" means that a dependent claim can only refer to its previous claim, which can be an independent claim or other dependent claims. The reason why "reverse quotation" is prohibited is that "reverse quotation" easily (but not necessarily) leads to confusion of rights relations, which leads to the defect that the scope of protection of claims is unclear. Moreover, "reverse quotation" also violates the common sense of writing and adds unnecessary trouble to readers.

(2) "Selective citation" means that two or more claims can only be cited in a parallel and selective way. The reason why "parallel and simultaneous selection" is prohibited lies in the independence of claims. If all the "quoted parts" are directly written into the dependent claim, then the dependent claim will be irrelevant to other claims. The "subordinate" of the subordinate claim is only formal, and there is no distinction between "master and slave" and "independence and non-independence" in substance. Independent features make claims mutually exclusive and can only be used separately.

(3) "Multiple non-citation" means that a right citing multiple claims cannot be cited by another right citing multiple claims. Why is "multiple cross-references" prohibited? The reason is that "multi-item cross-reference" has the combination of multiple technical schemes, which easily (but not necessarily) leads to the disorder of the relationship between rights and leads to the defect of unclear protection scope of claims.

For the citation of dependent claims, in addition to the above three restrictions, there is usually a fourth restriction, that is, "cross-independence without reference". The so-called "cross-independence without reference" means that all dependent claims directly or indirectly subordinate to an independent claim should be placed after the independent claim and before another independent claim, that is, there can be no independent claim between the cited and the cited. The reason why "cross-independent citation" is prohibited is to conform to the existing writing conventions and reduce the reading burden of readers.

From the above analysis of the citation restriction of "citation part", it can be found that what really restricts the citation of subordinate claims is "substitute citation", while other restrictive reasons are too far-fetched and harsh.