This paper proposes a methodology for the construction of a patent test collection for the task of prior art search. Key to the justification of the methodology is an analysis of the nature and structure of patent documents and the patenting process. These factors enable a corpus of patent documents to be reverse engineered in order to arrive at high quality, realistic, relevance assessments. The paper first outlines the case for such a prior art search test collection along with the

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... tics of patent documents, before describing the proposed method. Further research and development will be directed towards the application of this methodology to create a suite of prior art search topics for the evaluation of patent retrieval systems. We also include a preliminary analysis of its application on European patents.