Visualizing and mapping the intellectual structure of information retrieval

Information retrieval is a long established subfield of library and information science. Since its inception in the early- to mid -1950s, it has grown as a result, in part, of well-regarded retrieval system evaluation exercises/campaigns, the proliferation of Web search engines, and the expansion of digital libraries. Although researchers have examined the intellectual structure and nature of the general field of library and information science, the same cannot be said about the subfield of information retrieval. We address that in this work by sketching the information retrieval intellectual landscape through visualizations of citation behaviors. Citation data for 10 years (2000–2009) were retrieved from the Web of Science and analyzed using existing visualization techniques. Our results address information retrieval’s co-authorship network, highly productive authors, highly cited journals and papers, author-assigned keywords, active institutions, and the import of ideas from other disciplines.