Innovating Patent Retrieval: A Comprehensive Review of Techniques, Trends, and Challenges in Prior Art Searches

Abstract

As the patent landscape continues to grow, so does the complexity of retrieving relevant “prior art”, “background art”, or “state of the art” from an expanding pool of publicly available patent data, a critical step in establishing novelty. However, retrieving this information presents significant challenges due to its volume and complexity. This systematic literature review surveys patent retrieval techniques over the past decade, focusing on ‘prior art’ and ‘novelty’ searches. Adhering to the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, our research includes 78 pertinent articles selected from a corpus of 1441, providing an in-depth overview of recent advancements, emerging trends, challenges, and future directions in the field of patent prior art retrieval. The review addresses six research questions: defining the current state of the art, evaluating the efficacy of various approaches, examining commonly used patent data collections, exploring the impact of semantic search and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, identifying frequently used components of patent documents, and discussing ongoing challenges in the domain of patent prior art search and retrieval. Our findings highlight the growing use of NLP to enhance the precision and comprehensiveness of patent searches, particularly on the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for Intellectual Property (CLEF-IP) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) databases. Despite advancements, the specialized and technical nature of patent language continues to pose significant challenges in achieving high accuracy in patent retrieval.