Patent information retrieval is a term summarized by people engaged in patent literature work in long-term work practice, which refers to the activity of finding patent information.
Simply put, patent information retrieval is the search for patent information. Quoting the Dictionary of Invention Patent Licensing and Patent Information Terms published by the National Committee for Invention and Discovery of the former Soviet Union 1986, it is defined as the process of selecting documents or information that meet a certain requirement from a large number of patent documents or patent databases according to a data feature.