IRF Survey on Patent Search Behavior

The survey conducted by Leif Azzopardi, Hideo Joho and Wim Vanderbauwhede (University of Glasgow, UK) and commissioned by the IRF is available online.

A Survey on Patent Users Search Behavior, Search Functionality and System Requirements

With a growing interest in Patent Information Retrieval, there is a need to better understand the context associated with patent users, their tasks and their needs and expectations of patent search and analysis tools, systems and applications. Patent search is known to be a complex, difficult and challenging activity, usually requiring expert Patent Information Specialists to spend a substantial amount of time sourcing (or not) documents relevant to their particular task. Information Retrieval provides a whole array of possible techniques, tools and methods which could be applied in order to ease the burden of such retrieval tasks, and also make searching patents more accessible to non-Patent Information Specialists. In this report, we outline the findings from a survey of patent users conducted to ascertain information about patent users and their requirements with respect to Information Retrieval applications.

Download the  PDF here.

Parts of the report were presented at SIGIR 2010 and IIiX 2010 and can be found in the following publications:

- A Survey of Patent Analysts' Search Requirements, Leif Azzopardi, Wim Vanderbauwhede (University of Glasgow), Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba), Proceedings of the 33th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2010), 2010

- A Survey on Patent Users: An Analysis of Tasks, Behavior, Search Functionality and System Requirements, Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba, Japan), Leif Azzopardi (University of Glasgow, UK), Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Information Interaction in Context (IIiX 2010), 2010