The Information Retrieval Anthology 2021: inaugural status report and challenges ahead

To quote from a paper published in the June 2021 issue of SIGIR Forum, “The Information Retrieval Anthology, IR Anthology for short, is an endeavor to create a comprehensive collection of metadata and full texts of IR-related publications. We report on its first release, the use cases it can serve, as well as the challenges lying ahead to develop it towards a resource that serves the IR community for years to come. The IR Anthology’s metadata browser and full text search engine are available at IR.webis.de.”  The anthology is a quite amazing piece of research that takes the approach of the ACL Anthology and extends it to Information Retrieval, indexing and categorising 53,673 research papers on information retrieval from journals and conference proceedings.  The papers are presented in a year-by-year chronology. 

At the time of writing this item the June 2021 issue of SIGIR Forum exists on the ACM Digital Library (and is therefore restricted access to ACM Members) but the open access version has not been added to the SIGIR Forum web site. The Anthology listing is available but this site gives no background information on the project. The list of proceedings and journals is very useful though I am surprised to see that the Journal of Information Science is not included.

In passing I should note that there is a very good overview of the ECIR 2021 conference in this issue of Forum.

It is disappointing that there is no indication (as of 3 August) as to why the OA issue is not available on the SIGIR web site. However there is an open-access summary version of the paper presented at SIGIR 2021

About Martin White
Martin White

Martin is an information scientist and the author of Making Search Work and Enterprise Search. He has been involved with optimising search applications since the mid-1970s and has worked on search projects in both Europe and North America. Since 2002 he has been a Visiting Professor at the Information School, University of Sheffield and is currently working on developing new approaches to search evaluation.

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