In Praise of Interdisciplinary Research through Scientometrics

International audienceThe BIR workshop series foster the revitalisation of dormant links between two fields in information science: information retrieval and bibliometrics/scientometrics. Hopefully, tightening up these links will cross-fertilise both fields. I believe compelling research questions lie at the crossroads of scientometrics and other fields: not only information retrieval but also, for instance, psychology and sociology. This overview paper traces my endeavours to explore these field boundaries. I wish to communicate my enthusiasm about interdisciplinary research mediated by scientometrics and stress the opportunities offered to researchers in information science

Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval: 2nd International BIR Workshop

This workshop brings together experts of communities which often have been perceived as different once: bibliometrics / scientometrics / informetrics on the one side and information retrieval on the other. Our motivation as organizers of the workshop started from the observation that main discourses in both fields are different, that communities are only partly overlapping and from the belief that a knowledge transfer would be profitable for both sides. Bibliometric techniques are not yet widely used to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. On the other side, more and more information professionals, working in libraries and archives are confronted with applying bibliometric techniques in their services. This way knowledge exchange becomes more urgent. The first workshop set the research agenda, by introducing in each other methods, reporting about current research problems and brainstorming about common interests. This follow-up workshop continues the overall communication, but also puts one problem into the focus. In particular, we will explore how statistical modelling of scholarship can improve retrieval services for specific communities, as well as for large, cross-domain collections like Mendeley or ResearchGate. This second BIR workshop continues to raise awareness of the missing link between Information Retrieval (IR) and bibliometrics and contributes to create a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into retrieval at the scholarly search engine interface.Comment: 4 pages, 37th European Conference on Information Retrieval, BIR worksho

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

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Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

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Congresos

B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project

COMPUTER GENERATED PAPERS AS A NEW CHALLENGE TO PEER REVIEW

Computer generated papers (CGP) pose a serious problem to academic integrity and publishing. The problem began with SCIgen. Created in 2005 by MIT students, SCIgen is a software program that generates papers with simulated content. In 2014, we learned that more than 120 CGP passed through the peer review process, were published in well-known academic journals, and had to be retracted. I conducted research into the journal editing and peer review process to discover more about this problem and how it might be remedied. I conducted interviews with five journal editors from across the world, coded the information, and performed a thematic analysis. My thesis concludes with recommendations to control the CGP problem, including: increased awareness on the part of journal editors, CGP detection software, improving due diligence on the part of reviewers, and addressing the publish or perish paradigm that drives desperate faculty to compromise academic integrity by submitting CGP to journals