The BIR / BIRNDL & SCOLIA Workshop Series

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR/BIRNDL) tackles issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. BIR is a hot topic investigated by both academia (e.g., ArnetMiner, CiteSeerX) and industry (e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Semantic Scholar). Broadening its scope, BIR continues as the International Workshop on Scholarly Information Access (SCOLIA).

Searching for scientific information is a long-lived information need. In the early 1960s, Salton was already striving to enhance information retrieval by including clues inferred from bibliographic citations. The development of citation indexes pioneered by Garfield proved determinant for such a research endeavor at the crossroads between the nascent fields of Information Retrieval (IR) and Bibliometrics. The pioneers who established these fields in Information Science—such as Salton and Garfield—were followed by scientists who specialised in one of these, leading to the two loosely connected fields we know of today.

The purpose of the BIR workshop series founded in 2014 is to tighten up the link between IR and Bibliometrics. We strive to get the ‘retrievalists’ and ‘citationists’ active in both academia and the industry together, who are developing search engines and recommender systems.

BIR/BIRNDL has been held at different prestigious venues such as SIGIR, ECIR, JCDL. A list of past BIR/BIRNDL events is below. BIR 2024 was held in conjunction with ECIR 2024 in Glasgow, Scotland. SCOLIA 2025 will be held at ECIR 2025 in Lucca, Italy.

BIR 2023

13th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2023).  April, 2023. 

Collocated with the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023).

BIR 2022

12th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2022).  April, 2022. Proceedings

Collocated with the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022).

BIR 2021

11th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2021). Online event, April, 2021. Proceedings

Collocated with the 43rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021).

BIR 2020

10th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2020). Lisbon, Portugal. April, 2020.  Proceedings

Collocated with the 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2020).

BIRNDL 2019

9th BIR workshop held as 4th BIRNDL workshop. Paris, France. July, 2019. Proceedings

Collocated with the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019).

BIR 2019

8th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2019). Cologne, Germany. April, 2019. Proceedings

Collocated with the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2019).

BIR 2018

7th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2018). Grenoble, France. March, 2018. Proceedings

Collocated with the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018).

BIRNDL 2017

6th BIR workshop hold as 2nd BIRNDL workshop. Tokio, Japan. August, 2017. Proceedings

Collocated with the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2017).

BIR 2017

5th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2017). Aberdeen, UK. April, 2017. Proceedings

Collocated with the 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017).

BIRNDL 2016

4th BIR workshop hold as 1st BIRNDL workshop. Newark, USA. June, 2016. Proceedings

Collocated with the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2016 (JCDL 2016).

BIR 2016

3rd International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2017). Padua, Italy. March, 2016. Proceedings

Collocated with the 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2016).

BIR 2015

2nd International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2015). Vienna, Austria. March, 2015. Proceedings

Collocated with the 37th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2015).

BIR 2014

1st International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2014). Amsterdam, the Netherlands. April, 2014. Proceedings

Collocated with the 36th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2014).

Central publications of the BIR group, describing the BIR idea and activities, are listed below:

• Cabanac, G., Frommholz, I., & Mayr, P. (2020). Scholarly literature mining with Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing: Preface. Scientometrics, 125(3), 2835–2840. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03763-4 

• Cabanac, G., Frommholz, I., & Mayr, P. (2020). Bibliometric-Enhanced Information Retrieval 10th Anniversary Workshop Edition. In J. M. Jose, E. Yilmaz, J. Magalhães, P. Castells, N. Ferro, M. J. Silva, & F. Martins (Eds.), Advances in Information Retrieval (Vol. 12036, pp. 641–647). Springer International Publishing. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-030-45442-5_85 

• Mayr, P., Scharnhorst, A., Larsen, B., Schaer, P., & Mutschke, P. (2014). Bibliometric-Enhanced Information Retrieval. In M. et al. de Rijke (Ed.), 36th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2014, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 13-16, 2014. Proceedings (pp. 798–801). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06028-6_99 

Note: All presented papers at the BIR workshops are documented in the "Bibliometric-enhanced-IR Bibliography". See bibtex files [birYYYY.bib].