Performing Informetric Analysis on Information Retrieval Test Collections: Preliminary Experiments in the Physics Domain

The combination of informetric analysis and information retrieval allows a twofold application. (1) While informetrics analysis is primarily used to gain insights into a scientific domain, it can be used to build recommendation or alternative ranking services. They are usually based on methods like co-occurrence or citation analyses. (2) Information retrieval and its decades-long tradition of rigorous evaluation using standard document corpora, predefined topics and relevance judgements can be used as a test bed for informetric analyses. We show a preliminary experiment on how both domains can be connected using the iSearch test collection, a standard information retrieval test collection derived from the open access arXiv.org preprint server. In this paper the aim is to draw a conclusion about the appropriateness of iSearch as a test bed for the evaluation of a retrieval or recommendation system that applies informetric methods to improve retrieval results for the user. Based on an interview study with physicists, bibliographic coupling and author-co-citation analysis, important authors for ten different research questions are identified. The results show that the analysed corpus includes these authors and their corresponding documents. This study is a first step towards a combination of retrieval evaluations and the evaluation of informetric analyses methods. Conference Topic Old and New Data Sources for Scientometric Studies: Coverage, Accuracy and Reliability (Topic 2), Research Fronts and Emerging Issues (Topic 4) and Open Access and Scientometrics (Topic 10).