BIR 2020 Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval




                                                     Building bridges?

                                                          Andrea Scharnhorst

                                              Data Archiving and Networked Services,
                                          Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
                                                Anna van Saksenlaan 51, 2593 HW,
                                                   The Hague, The Netherlands
                                                 andrea.scharnhorst@dans.knaw.nl




                          I came to bibliometrics from physics. I used mathematical models to de-
                      scribe how researchers travel between existing fields and/or create new topics.
                      A bit a decent modeler of course needs data to validate her/his models and this
                      brought me to the quantitative studies of science. Reading JASIST, Journal of
                      Documentation, Scientometrics and other LIS journals I discovered the fasci-
                      nating world of studies about scholarly communication, and how to manage it
                      in times of exponential growth. How for instance one can create in a library
                      a collection of journals which as perfect as possible covers a topic distributed
                      over a range of journals when in science or academia in essence everything is
                      connected to everything else, a universe of knowledge in other words? This is
                      why I liked Philipp’s work so much, who tried to bring bibliometrics laws (such
                      as Bradford’s) into the very concrete organization of on-line collections. This is
                      also why I was immediately convinced and pleased to have been asked to join an
                      endeavor to bring IR and bibliometrics together—what culminated in the series
                      of BIR workshops. Information retrieval, Wolfgang Glänzel would say, belongs
                      to the very heart of bibliometrics, and indeed the famous science citation index
                      was primarily designed as a tool to enhance the information retrieval, to make
                      it easier to find the relevant items in the ever-expanding literature. But, at the
                      time BIR started the Information Retrieval and bibliometrics communities had
                      started to grow apart somehow. Bibliometrics, scientometrics were very much
                      focused on indicators and research evaluation. At the same time, one could ob-
                      serve that whenever computer scientists, who designed new information systems
                      and addressed IR for all kind of information, turned their interest to scholarly
                      communication, they were often not in touch with the body of knowledge pro-
                      duced in bibliometrics so far. So, the start of the BIR workshops was very timely,
                      and its continuing success—visible in submissions, attendance and publications
                      proves that it fulfills a necessity, it belongs to those rare but important singular
                      links to bring different bodies of knowledge together.
                                                                        Da möchte man ausrufen: Weiter so!
                                                                                           Warmest regards
                                                                                                   Andrea
                      ?
                          A companion video is hosted at https://youtu.be/kNPVZZ7Mq0M.




Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
                                                BIR 2020, 14 April 2020, Lisbon, Portugal.
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