NOTE

Publishing Survey Articles on Information Retrieval Topics
Douglas W. Oard,1 Fabrizio Sebastiani,2Jonathan Furner3 and Gary Marchionini4(1) University of Maryland, College Park, MD20742, USA;(2) Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione,
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 56124 Pisa, Italy;(3) University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA;
(4) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
oard@umd.edu, fabrizio.sebastiani@isti,cnr.it,
furner@gseis.ucla.edu, gary@ils.unc.edu
AbstractSurvey articles are an important way of sharing knowledge among interested researchers andcontributing to the growth of a field. This brief note identifies several outlets for survey articles
on information retrieval, and identifies some reasons to write articles of this type.

1

Introduction

The role of research papers is well understood. Survey articles, however, are perhaps
somewhat more mysterious. Why do people write survey articles? Where do they
publish them? In this brief note, we offer our thoughts on those questions in the context
of information retrieval research.

2Why?

Survey articles, sometimes known as review articles, essentially fill a niche somewhere
between tutorials and books. Tutorials at conferences such as SIGIR, JCDL, CIKM andWSDM often seek to address “hot topics,” and to cover them broadly and inunderstandable terms for the benefit of the uninitiated, or of the researcher coming froma neighboring field. The topics could consist of new methods or new applications—theunifying characteristic of a hot topic is the potential for a rapidly growing researchcommunity that is (or should be!) attracting substantial attention. At the other end of thespectrum, books often seek to present well formed perspectives on some coherent set oftopics. Survey articles are in some sense a middle ground, focused on a specific topic ina manner similar to a tutorial, but bringing together a fairly well established picture ofthat topic in a manner similar to a book.
As with other publications, people write survey articles because they have something tosay. Most survey authors review the state of knowledge on the topic using a uniqueperspective or organizational rubric. It is the perspective or rubric that constitutes anoriginal contribution by the author. In survey articles, authors principally review andevaluate the work of others, although of course their own work should also receive
balanced treatment. They give full references to the literature that reports on thisprevious work (journal articles, conference proceedings, technical reports, etc., bothpublished and unpublished), providing commentary on the relative significance of thefindings and products of different projects, the soundness of the various approaches
taken, and the utility of the theories and applications developed.
The typical author of a survey article is someone who has been conducting active
research on the topic of the article for five years or more, although shorter surveys are
sometimes authored by Ph.D. students. The initial survey on a topic often results from arecognition that the seminal work on a topic is simply too scattered across the research
literature, and that bringing it together in one place could contribute to lowering the bar
for a researcher wishing to enter the field and in general could contribute to a better
understanding of the field. Subsequent surveys typically seek to update earlier ones, orto see their subject matter from a different angle. Good survey articles can be very
influential, and thus highly cited. Just as writing a well regarded book can contribute tobuilding your reputation, having a highly cited survey article on your CV can be abenefit as well.

3Where?

A decade ago, survey articles on information retrieval (IR) topics were not at allcommon. ACM Computing Surveys, the primary venue for publishing survey articles inthe field of computer science at large, did (and still does) occasionally publish
something on IR, but the space it can devote to IR is obviously limited. Focusing moreon some aspects of IR, one long-running venue was the American Society for
Information Science and Technology’s Annual Review of Information Science andTechnology (ARIST), which has published a collection of surveys on topics in Libraryand Information Science (LIS) and related fields once each year since 1966.
Much has changed in recent years, however. Financial pressures resulted in ARIST
ceasing publication with the 2011 volume and being replaced with a regular series ofreview articles in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science andTechnology. Two other publishers have also started series that welcome surveys in arange of fields, including two devoted to information retrieval: Synthesis Lectures on
Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services (Morgan & Claypool Publishers), andFoundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (Now Publishers).
Here’s a summary of some of the places where IR survey articles can now be found:

Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. This series,
founded and edited by Gary Marchionini, publishes 50-125 page monographs (calledlectures) on topics that would be within the scope of conferences such as SIGIR, JCDL,CIKM, and ASIST. The series includes both survey articles and other topic-focused
lectures. It started publication in 2009, and has published 18 monographs since then.
Each lecture is available as an ebook as well as a paper format, and each format has its
own ISBN number. Lectures are available 4-6 weeks after the final manuscript isdelivered.
Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (FnTIR). This journal, now edited byDoug Oard and Fabrizio Sebastiani (Fabrizio and Jamie Callan were the foundingeditors) publishes 80-150 page survey articles on topics that would be within the scopeof conferences such as SIGIR, CIKM and WSDM. The journal started publication in

2006, and has published 15 issues since then (each consisting of a single survey). It is ajournal, in the sense that it has an ISSN number, that it is indexed as such, and that it isorganized in volumes. However, it can also be seen as a series of monographs, in thesense that each issue consists of a single survey paper, and as such is also soldindividually (as a monograph with its own ISBN number).
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).
This journal, edited by Blaise Cronin (with Jonathan Furner as the editor for surveyarticles), now additionally fills the role previously filled by ARIST. JASIST refers to its
series of survey articles as “Advances in Information Science,” inviting articles of up to36 pages (10,000 words) on topics in any area of information science. Publication ofAdvances in Information Science articles in JASIST began in mid-2011, with microblog
search and social Q&A among the topics covered in the series’ first year.
ACM Computing Surveys. This journal, edited by Chris Hankin (with Louiqa Raschid as
Associate Editor for Information Systems), publishes survey articles of up to 40 pages
on topics in any area of computer science. The most recent IR survey was published in2009 (on Web search result clustering). Issues are available in the ACM Digital
Library.
To this list we might add several other places where IR survey articles occasionallyappear, including the Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Human LanguageTechnologies (3 IR surveys to date) and Synthesis Lectures on Data Management (4 IRsurveys to date), and Now Publishers' Foundations and Trends in Web Science (1 IRsurvey to date).
Several criteria might come to mind when selecting a venue. Quite obviously,
manuscript lengths vary considerably. All of these publications are typically available
through the electronic holdings of most major research libraries, although the holdingsof specific libraries may vary. Because some of the publications are relatively new, theavailability of bibliometric data also varies. It takes about five years for a journal toacquire a publication record that allows an impact factor to be computed, so forexample an impact factor (i.e., citations per article) for FnTIR was first reported (usingScopus data) only this year. Policies regarding authors’ rights to post preprints or final
versions of their work on their personal Web sites also differ somewhat. And, of course,
the time in review and the time from review to publication will surely differ as well.
Some of these factors are easily researched on the Web, others are best found bycontacting the editors.

4Conclusion

We are fortunate to now have a rich range of venues through which we can sharereflective syntheses of our progress as a research community. Our hope is that this briefnote will help those who are ready to write to think through where best to publish theirwork, and to help those who are looking for that work to know where they can find it.