This is a very useful list of surveys from Doug Oard, which would be definitely helpful for those who want to enter this territory. 

Information Retrieval Surveys

These surveys typically address a focused topic in the broad area of information retrieval. I have listed here surveys on topics that are clearly central to information retrieval; additional surveys on related topics can be found on the Web site of each series. Links to freely available versions are provided when available; others are available through Research Port at the University of Maryland Libraries.

Longer Surveys

These surveys are the length of short books, typically about 100 pages.

• Now Publishers
  • Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval
    1. Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review (2006)
    2. Open-Domain Question Answering (2007)
    3. Email Spam Filtering: A Systematic Review (2008)
    4. Statistical Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Critical Review (2008)
    5. Concept-Based Video Retrieval (2009)
    6. Methods for Evaluating Interactive Information Retrieval Systems with Users (2009)
    7. Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval (2009)
    8. The Probabilistic Relevance Framework: BM25 and beyond (2009)
    9. Mining Query Logs: Turning Search Usage Data into Knowledge (2009)
    10. Web Crawling (2010)
    11. Test Collection Based Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems (2010)
    12. Adversarial Web Search (2011)
    13. Federated Search (2011)
    14. Spoken Content Retrieval: A Survey of Techniques and Technologies (2012)
    15. Information Retrieval on the Blogosphere (2012)
    16. Expertise Retrieval (2012)
    17. Contextual Search: A Computational Framework (2012)
    18. Patent Retrieval (2013)
    19. Information Retrieval for E-Discovery (2013)
    20. Arabic Information Retrieval (2014)
    21. Semantic Matching in Search (2014)
  • Foundations and Trends in Human Computer Interaction
    1. Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems (2011)
  • Foundations and Trends in Web Science
    1. From Keyword Search to Exploration: Designing Future Search Interfaces for the Web (2010)
• Morgan and Claypool Publishers
  • Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval and Services
    1. Information Retrieval Models: Foundations and Relationships
    2. Search User Interface Design
    3. Information Retrieval Evaluation
    4. Search-Based Applications: At the Confluence of Search and Database Technologies
    5. Estimating the Query Difficulty in Information Retrieval
    6. Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When and Why
    7. Multimedia Information Retrieval
    8. XML Retrieval
    9. Faceted Search
    10. Exploratory Search: Beyond the Query-Response Paradigm
  • Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies
    1. Learning to Rank for IR and NLP
    2. Cross-Language Information Retrieval
    3. Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce
    4. Statistical Language Models for Information Retrieval
  • Synthesis Lectures on Data Management
    1. Deep Web Query Interface Understanding and Integration
    2. Full-Text (Substring) Indexes in External Memory
    3. Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology
    4. Web Page Recommendation Models: Theory and Algorithms
  • Synthesis Lectures on Information Security, Privacy and Trust
    1. Private Information Retrieval
  • Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics
    1. Interacting with Information
• Springer
  • Springer Briefs on Computer Science
    1. Visual Indexing and Retrieval

  Shorter Surveys

  These surveys are the length of journal articles, typically about 20 pages.
  • ACM Computing Surveys
    1. Collaborative Filtering beyond the User-Item Matrix: State of the Art and Future Challenges
    2. Multimedia Search Reranking: A literature survey
    3. Aggregated Search: A new information retrieval paradigm
    4. Near-Duplicate Video Retrieval: Current research and future trends
    5. Translation Techniques in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
    6. A survey of Emerging Approaches to Spam Filtering
    7. A Survey of Automatic Query Expansion in Information Retrieval
  • Advances in Information Science (JASIST)
    1. Ranking Methods for Entity-Oriented Semantic Web Search
    2. Collaborative Information Seeking
    3. Social Q and A
    4. Information Search and Retrieval in Microblogs