About the Journal

Aims and scope

Information Research is now in its thirtieth year of existence, and many things have changed over the past 30 years: the journal was founded in 1995, when the Internet and the World Wide Web were in their infancy, and the idea was to create a journal that covered the information disciplines in general. At the time, that meant information science, librarianship, information systems, archives and records management, and information management. Those disciplines have now changed significantly, and new information-related disciplines and sub-disciplines have emerged.

Consequently, we have revised the scope of the journal to include the areas listed below. We are interested in papers within information-related disciplines that are oriented towards the human information seeker and user.

For example, we are not interested in the algorithms used in information systems, but rather in the impact of such systems on the information user, or in which users’ requirements are explored in the design of systems.

We accept submissions within the following disciplines and sub-disciplines:

• Business intelligence and data analytics; competitive intelligence; information security, cybersecurity, information economics, special libraries and information services.
• Communication and media: scholarly communication; academic libraries; digital publishing; bibliometrics; webometrics; infometrics.
• Cultural heritage: digital humanities, archives, records management, digital curation.
• Data science: data mining; data sharing; big data; data visualisation.
• Disciplinary applications: bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, health informatics; information in education.
• Human-computer interaction; computer-mediated communication; computer-supported cooperative work; mobile computing.
• Human information behaviour: usability, user experience; information sharing; user diversity; health information behaviour.
• Information, digital and media literacy.
• Information systems: AI & machine learning; information retrieval; search; information systems management; Internet and the World Wide Web: webometrics.
• Knowledge organisation: classification, thesaurus construction, manual and machine indexing, problems of terminology.
• Society and information: public libraries and information services; social informatics; social media; social networks; computational social science; digital divide; digital libraries; information policy; security and privacy.

Intended readership

The journal's intended readership includes scholars, researchers, and practitioners in Library and Information Science.

All submitted manuscripts are first assessed by an editor who decides whether the manuscript is suitable to be sent for peer review.

Manuscripts deemed suitable for further review are sent to two or more experts who are tasked with highlighting the manuscript's general and specific merits and shortcomings.

The journal uses a double-blind review procedure before acceptance/rejection of manuscripts, which means that authors and reviewers are anonymous throughout the review process.

The review process is expected to take 6 to 8 weeks but may vary depending on reviewer availability.

Based on the review, the editor then compiles a recommendation to a) accept the manuscript for publication b) ask the author to revise the manuscript or c) reject the manuscript.

The overall publishing responsibility rests with the journal's editor-in-chief, who has a qualified editorial board for support in various issues regarding the publication of individual manuscripts, the journal's development, etc.

Original articles are externally peer-reviewed, while invited and other content is peer-reviewed internally, and book reviews are approved by the editors without external peer review.

In cases where a manuscript’s author is in some way associated with the editorial team, they will be removed from all editorial tasks for that article. An independent editor will be tasked with organizing the peer-review process. The author's affiliation with the journal will also be indicated in the final publication of the article.

The journal accepts manuscripts that have previously been uploaded for review as preliminary versions, on personal websites, presented at conferences, or made available through other informal communication channels. However, authors must hold copyright for the text in question. Authors are also encouraged, when available, to include links to previous versions of the article in the final version of the article published in the journal.

Duplicate publication, also called "redundant publication" or "dual publication", is not permitted. This refers to the publication of the same article in more than one journal or to the publication of a document that is substantially similar to one already published without reference to the original publication.

Learn more about the journal's editorial policies >>