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With the growing volume of information and information needs, technology support to retrieve information has become indispensable. We focus on information retrieval (IR) of a specic type of content, namely, source code. Source code retrieval has attracted the attention of several researchers in the last decade. This research has resulted in several useful applications such as code completion, example search, plagiarism detection, automated feedback for programming assignments, feature location, and bug localization. We discuss literature from the software engineering (SE) domain to understand the role of IR in SE, specically where source code is involved, either as content or query. We also explore how text retrieval techniques have been leveraged for code search, by modeling source code in ecient and impacting ways.