Search system requirements of patent analysts

Abstract

Patent search tasks are difficult and challenging, often requiring expert patent analysts to spend hours, even days, sourcing relevant information. To aid them in this process, analysts use Information Retrieval systems and tools to cope with their retrieval tasks. With the growing interest in patent search, it is important to determine their requirements and expectations of the tools and systems that they employ. In this poster, we report a subset of the findings of a survey of patent analysts conducted to elicit their search requirements.