A survey of patent users

With a growing interest in Patent Information Retrieval, there is a need to better understand the context associated with patent users, their tasks, needs and expectations of patent search 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 and tools which could be applied to ease the burden of such retrieval tasks, and also make searching patents more accessible to non-Patent Information Specialists. In this paper, we report the findings from a survey of patent users conducted to ascertain information about patent users and their search requirements with respect to Information Retrieval systems and applications.