[NORSLIS] cfp: JASIST: Re-orienting Search Engine Research in Information Science

Tue Jun 7 08:56:39 GMT 2022

Dear colleagues,

Please consider submitting to a special Issue of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) on the topic “Re-orienting Search Engine Research in Information Science”

Timeline (subject to change)

    Submissions due: November 15, 2022
    Decision after first round of reviews: February 28, 2023
    Special Issue to be published in September, 2023

Guest editors:

-        Dirk Lewandowski, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany (dirk.lewandowski at haw-hamburg.de<mailto:dirk.lewandowski at haw-hamburg.de>)

-        Jutta Haider, Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Borås, Sweden (jutta.haider at hb.se<mailto:jutta.haider at hb.se>)

-        Olof Sundin, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden (olof.sundin at kultur.lu.se<mailto:olof.sundin at kultur.lu.se>)

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.

We welcome papers representing a variety of approaches. Papers can be theoretical, conceptual or empirical or combinations thereof.
More info here: https://www.asist.org/2022/05/12/call-for-papers-jasist-special-issue-on-re-orienting-search-engine-research-in-information-science

Overview
General web search engines are an essential part of today's information infrastructure. They have made it possible to find almost anything on the Internet by typing a few keywords into an empty search box. In fact, search engines have become so integrated into devices and practices that you can get an answer before you even knew how to phrase the question. Search engines shape our lives and at the same time shape the society and culture we live in. We use them at work, in school, in research, in planning our vacations, in finding products, and in politics – just to name a few important areas.The search engine market is dominated by a few companies that have divided the market into regions: Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia and Google in much of the Western world. More competition between search engines is often called for, but is very difficult to achieve. On the other side, we find the content providers doing everything they can by employing various types of search engine optimization (SEO) to achieve the highest rank on the search engine results page when people search for information.
In information science, search engines have been studied mainly in the subfield of information retrieval and information behaviour. The study of search engines has thus been a core task of information science since the discipline's beginnings in the 1960s and even before (Saracevic, 2009). With concepts such as relevance or precision and recall, the evaluation of effectiveness has often been the focus of research.
While general web search engines play an extremely important role in today's information infrastructure - economically, culturally, politically, technically, etc. - and have become an integral part of daily life at many levels, information science has only partially embraced the role of general web search engines in society. Research is fragmented into different subfields of information science and these fields do not always communicate well with each other. In this special issue, we call on information science researchers to join us in the investigation of general web search engines, also from outside Information Retrieval.

Why information science?

Information science can look back on a long and rich tradition of studying search and search systems. Relevance, one of the most central concepts for even contemporary search engines, has its origin in the field (Saracevic, 1975). Still, there are some blind spots, especially what role different types of relevance play when it comes to search engines (cf. Sundin, Lewandowski & Haider, 2021). These search engines index a plethora of content and have a very low-quality threshold when it comes to including documents in their indexes. Therefore, ranking results in a way that benefits users and at the same time provide societal relevance is paramount.
From a technical viewpoint, information retrieval research has contributed to search engines by developing indexing methods (e.g., Sparck Jones, 1972) and ranking algorithms, with link-based algorithms being based on central ideas from information science, namely citation analysis (Garfield, 1979). Evaluation campaigns such as TREC (Haarman & Voorhees, 2006) and CLEF (Ferro & Peters, 2019) have developed solid methods and procedures to thoroughly test search engines.
On the user side, information science research has contributed to the development and understanding of search engines through developing information-seeking models (e.g., Bates, 1989; Kuhlthau, 2003; Belkin, Oddy & Brooks, 1982) that are used in system development (White, 2016). Information behaviour re-search has also produced a large body of empirical work on people's behaviour when looking for and using information.
Information science, with its rich tradition of studying these topics, provides a good starting point for investigating today's search engines (Haider & Sundin, 2019; Lewandowski, Sünkler & Schultheiß, 2020; Lewandowski et al., 2021). As the field is interdisciplinary, it can also can serve as a hub for integrating research from other fields.

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Jutta Haider
Professor in Information Studies

Swedish School of Library and Information Science
Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT
University of Borås
https://www.hb.se/en/research/research-portal/researchers/JUHA

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