Rob Koopman

Judit Bar-Ilan, Rob Koopman, Shenghui Wang et al.

This panel brings together experts in bibliometrics and information retrieval to discuss how each of these two important areas of information science can help to inform the research of the other. There is a growing body of literature that capitalizes on the synergies created by combining methodological approaches of each to solve research problems and practical issues related to how information is created, stored, organized, retrieved and used. The session will begin with an overview of the common threads that exist between IR and metrics, followed by a summary of findings from the BIR workshops and examples of research projects that combine aspects of each area to benefit IR or metrics research areas, including search results ranking, semantic indexing and visualization. The panel will conclude with an engaging discussion with the audience to identify future areas of research and collaboration.

Rob Koopman, Shenghui Wang, Andrea Scharnhorst

This paper builds on an innovative Information Retrieval tool, Ariadne. The tool has been developed as an interactive network visualization and browsing tool for large-scale bibliographic databases. It basically allows to gain insights into a topic by contextualizing a search query (Koopman et al., 2015). In this paper, we apply the Ariadne tool to a far smaller dataset of 111,616 documents in astronomy and astrophysics. Labeled as the Berlin dataset, this data have been used by several research teams to apply and later compare different clustering algorithms. The quest for this team effort is how to delineate topics. This paper contributes to this challenge in two different ways. First, we produce one of the different cluster solution and second, we use Ariadne (the method behind it, and the interface - called LittleAriadne) to display cluster solutions of the different group members. By providing a tool that allows the visual inspection of the similarity of article clusters produced by different algorithms, we present a complementary approach to other possible means of comparison. More particular, we discuss how we can - with LittleAriadne - browse through the network of topical terms, authors, journals and cluster solutions in the Berlin dataset and compare cluster solutions as well as see their context.