Intellectual property and the patent system in particular have been extremely present in research and discussion, even in the public media, in the last few years. Without going into any controversial issues regarding the patent system, we approach a very real and growing problem: searching for innovation. The target collection for this task does not consist of patent documents only, but it is in these documents that the main difference is found compared to web or news information retrieval. In addition, the issue of patent search implies a particular user model and search process model. This review is concerned with how research and technology in the field of Information Retrieval assists or even changes the processes of patent search. It is a survey of work done on patent data in relation to Information Retrieval in the last 20–25 years. It explains the sources of difficulty and the existing document processing and retrieval methods of the domain, and provides a motivation for further research in the area.

在过去的几年中，尤其是在公共媒体中，知识产权，尤其是专利制度在研究和讨论中都极为重要。在没有涉及专利制度的任何有争议的问题的情况下，我们提出了一个非常现实且不断增长的问题：寻求创新。此任务的目标集合不仅包括专利文件，而且与网络或新闻信息检索相比，在这些文件中发现了主要区别。另外，专利检索的问题意味着特定的用户模型和检索过程模型。这篇评论与信息检索领域的研究和技术如何帮助甚至改变专利检索的过程有关。它是对过去20–25年中与信息检索有关的专利数据所做的工作的调查。