Aiming at the defects of traditional full-text retrieval models in dealing with mathematical expressions, which are special objects different from ordinary texts, a multimodal retrieval and ranking method for scientific documents based on hesitant fuzzy sets (HFS) and XLNet is proposed. This method integrates multimodal information, such as mathematical expression images and context text, as keywords to realize the retrieval of scientific documents. In the image modal, the images of mathematical expressions are recognized, and the hesitancy fuzzy set theory is introduced to calculate the hesitancy fuzzy similarity between mathematical query expressions and the mathematical expressions in candidate scientific documents. Meanwhile, in the text mode, XLNet is used to generate word vectors of the mathematical expression context to obtain the similarity between the query text and the mathematical expression context of the candidate scientific documents. Finally, the multimodal evaluation is integrated, and the hesitation fuzzy set is constructed at the document level to obtain the final scores of the scientific documents and corresponding ranked output. The experimental results show that the recall and precision of this method are 0.774 and 0.663 on the NTCIR dataset, respectively, and the average normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG) value of the top-10 ranking results is 0.880 on the Chinese scientific document (CSD) dataset.