? A companion video is hosted at https://youtu.be/GkN4ngT1RIs.
I am Wolfgang Glanzel, Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Scientometrics. Using the opportunity of virtual communication, I would like to send my warmest greetings to the organisers and all attendees of the BIR2020 workshop by video message.
This is a very special occasion indeed. This year the workshop series on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval organises and celebrates its 10th event. BIR is a not only an international but a truly global endeavour as well. The BIR workshops have been held in nine countries ranging from locations in Europe to the US and Japan so far. And BIR is a truly interdisciplinary endeavour too as it developed synergies between subdisciplines of information science, computer science, computational linguistics and quantitative science and technology studies. This is the reason why bibliometricians like me have attended and do attend these workshops. I had also the pleasure to co-organise several special issues on events of the series for the journal Scientometrics. My special thanks are due to Philipp Mayr and Guillaume Cabanac, who served as guest editors already several times.
Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval also called Bibliometric-aided Retrieval by bibliometricians (so much for synergies ;)) has a quite long history even if pioneering work in this topic was not called so. It goes back, for instance, to research done and needed for scienti c information by the former ISI in Philadelphia by using citations and bibliographic links to enhance theirs services. It was actually at the STI conference in 2006, when Michel Zitt and Elise Bassecoulard from INRA in France and our sta at Leuven independently from each other introduced the concept Bibliometric-aided Retrieval from the perspective of bibliometricians based on their speci c needs, which were closely linked to topic delineation and research assessment. In the meantime, retrieval experts in information and computer science as well as bibliometricians systematically elaborated their concepts and methodology by joining their approaches and developing synergies.
Information scientists and bibliometricians know the concept of invisible colleges with their initially small but fast-growing communities very well. To become visible, they create their own speci c communication channels aiming to establish internal networks of broader and even public outreach. By doing so, the pioneers of BIR launched their workshop series in 2014 and in this way the community could create its own academic forum and by editing special journal issues of selected papers supplementing their workshop proceedings, the community also gained large visibility and is perceived a speci c research topic by colleagues in information science, science studies, research evaluation and even by stakeholders in science policy. I am also very thankful that representatives of BIR have contributed to the European Summer School for Scientometrics,1 the last event of which had laid its special focus on BIR.
I sincerely hope that the future will bring together research scientists from all contributing communities to reach an even closer collaboration, to increase synergy e ects and international and broad reception as a unique multifaceted endeavour that creates bene ts and added-values to both researchers and users in many disciplines. With this in mind, I wish the organisers and all participants of the present workshop success, fruitful discussions and a wonderful time in Lisbon.