The traditional switchgear partial discharge pattern recognition method lacks a certain generalization performance and the recognition accuracy is low, which is difficult to apply in practical engineering. In view of this, this paper proposes a switchgear partial discharge pattern recognition method based on residual convolutional neural network. By adding a residual module to the network to solve the problem of deterioration after the saturation of the network leads to the saturation of accuracy, and comprehensively utilize the shallow and deep features of switchgear partial discharge data fusion learning to achieve pattern recognition. In this paper, through partial discharge simulation experiments of different insulation defect types of switchgear and on-site detection of distribution stations, a sample database of partial discharge data of switchgear is constructed and analyzed. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy rate of the proposed method is 96.06%, which is at least 20.22% higher than the traditional recognition methods, and with the increase of the number of samples in the training set, the recognition rate is greatly improved. The comprehensive use of the feature layer fusion module and the residual module significantly improves the generalization performance of the model, and it is more suitable for practical engineering.