I was personally delighted to see the announcement from ASIS&T about a Special Issue in September 2023 on the topic of research into information retrieval.
To quote from the announcement
“We are looking for contributions that broaden the respective disciplinary, methodological, or empirical perspectives to identify and explore commercial search engines and their use and role in society from new angles, or that bring together different approaches in original ways. In particular, we would like to encourage information science/information studies, broadly understood, to reposition themselves and contribute the discipline’s expertise to shed light on the ever more powerful role of commercial search engines in almost all areas of society and everyday life, influencing not only how we know and what we know, but increasingly also how knowledge and information are created and communicated, to begin with.
The guest-editors welcome papers representing a variety of approaches. Papers can be theoretical, conceptual or empirical or combinations thereof.”
The provisional schedule is
- Submissions due: November 15, 2022
- Decision after first round of reviews: February 28, 2023
- Special Issue to be published in September, 2023
I’m planning to submit a paper for consideration that highlights the almost total lack of research into enterprise information seeking and examines the reasons and impacts, as well as suggesting a range of topics that are notable for their complete absence of research consideration! There are probably no more than perhaps 20 papers among the 80,000+ on other aspects of information retrieval that have been published since the late 1950s. The first survey I can find on information retrieval technology is Information Retrieval A Comprehensive Indexed Bibliography of 1957-1961 World Literature published in 1964. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4322543
Martin White