Submissions

Author Guidelines

Scope
IRRJ seeks previously unpublished papers on information retrieval research that are grounded in statistics, machine learning, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and perhaps other fields of related research such as recommender systems. Papers may contain:

• new principled algorithms with sound empirical validation, and with justification of theoretical, psychological, or biological nature; 
• experimental and/or theoretical studies yielding new insight into the design and behavior of information retrieval systems, including user-centric studies; 
• reproducibility studies and accounts of applications of existing techniques that shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of the methods; 
• formalization of new information retrieval tasks (e.g., in the context of new applications) and of methods for assessing the performance on those tasks;
• new evaluation approaches, including responsible information retrieval, fairness and non-discrimination in search;
• review and survey papers that contribute to the understanding of the state of the art in information retrieval;
• resource papers that describe a test collection or labelled dataset, designs and protocols of evaluation tasks, or software tools and services.

IRRJ emphasizes technical correctness over subjective significance, to facilitate scientific discourse on topics that may not yet be accepted in mainstream venues but may be important in the future.

Submission types
IRRJ accepts three types of papers: Normal papers, extended papers and opinion/review papers:

• Normal papers are original contributions of a length similar to papers submitted to conferences like SIGIR and ECIR  (about 20 pages IRRJ style)  that do not reuse the authors' prior work. There should not be any reuse of written text, figures or results between the submitted normal paper and any paper which has been published, accepted for publication, or submitted in parallel at another archival, peer-reviewed venue.
• Extended papers (about 40 pages) are original work like normal papers but with more depth than a typical conference paper. Extended papers may also be expanded versions of conference papers if they contain at least 50% new material, and the submission clearly cites the paper that was expanded.  Extended papers above 50 pages require a note of justification in the cover letter, and may be desk rejected. (Note that these page counts include appendices.)
• Opinion/Review papers are typically short papers (about 10 pages) but can be full length papers (no more than 50 pages) that discuss other papers, books, or that provide a new perspective on Information Retrieval.

Content
Papers must be concise and complete; manuscripts should be carefully proofread and polished. Submissions that do not meet these criteria may be desk-rejected. All claims should be clearly articulated and supported either by empirical experiments or theoretical analyses. When appropriate, authors are encouraged to implement their work and to demonstrate its utility on significant problems; any experiments reported should be reproducible. Papers describing systems should clearly describe the contributions or the principles underlying the system. Papers describing theoretical results should also discuss their practical utility. In general, it should be clear how the work advances the current state of understanding and why the advance matters. Papers should report on what was learned in doing the work, rather than merely on what was done.  Authors must clearly acknowledge the contributions of their predecessors, and situate their submission in the context of the broader information retrieval research literature. If a paper introduces new terminology or techniques, it should also explain why current terminology or techniques are insufficient. 

Originality 
Submissions to IRRJ cannot have been published previously in any other journal. We will consider submissions of extended papers (see above) that have been published at workshops or conferences. In these cases, we expect the IRRJ submission to cite the prior work, go into much greater depth and to extend the published results in a substantive way. In all cases, authors must notify IRRJ about previous publication at the time of submission, attach the previous paper as a supplementary document, and explain the differences from their prior work. 
IRRJ has a strict policy against plagiarism, including the undisclosed use of generative AI. When there is an accusation of plagiarism, IRRJ takes the following steps. 

• IRRJ asks the accuser to clearly document the plagiarism.
• IRRJ sends the documentation to the accused authors for a response.
• IRRJ  reviews the accusation and the response, possibly in consultation with other experts in the relevant fields, and makes a determination. 
• If IRRJ determines that there has been plagiarism, the paper is retracted (or rejected, if it is under submission). IRRJ may take additional steps, such as (but not necessarily limited to) contacting the program chairs of the major information retrieval conferences, contacting the editors of other journals, contacting the places of employment of the accused authors, and rejecting other manuscripts under submission to IRRJ by the same authors.

Preprint policy
You are allowed to submit papers to IRRJ that you have posted to pre-print/archival platforms, such as a personal website or arXiv.

Disclosure of funding and competing interests
Please identify any funding and competing interests that support the submitted work directly and indirectly. In order to pursue the work that you submitted to IRRJ, did any of the authors receive third party funding or third party support during the last 36 months prior to this submission? This question refers to any aspect of the submitted work, including but not limited to personal funding, data collection, data evaluation, computing hardware, cloud computing services, or programming support. Examples could be grants by a government agency, support by a private foundation or a charity, stipends or donations by a commercial sponsor. Please list all such funding sources. Additionally, you should disclose financial relationships of any of the authors with entities that could potentially be perceived to influence what you wrote in the submitted work, during the last 36 months prior to this submission. You should disclose interactions with any entity that could be considered broadly relevant to the work, even if the funding was not used to support the submitted work, and regardless of the amount of compensation. Examples could be engagements with commercial companies or startups (sabbaticals, employments, stipends), honorariums, donations of hardware or cloud computing services.

Submission procedure
IRRJ accepts submissions via its own electronic submission management system (click “Make a new submission” at the top of the author guidelines). Submissions must be typeset in LaTex using the IRRJ Latex Style.

• Download the IRRJ Latex style file.

Only PDF files should be submitted. Papers not in the IRRJ style file will be rejected without review. Articles may be accompanied by appendices containing data, demonstrations, instructions for obtaining source code, or the source code itself, if appropriate. We strongly encourage authors to include such appendices along with their papers. We also strongly encourage authors to submit their code and data sets to open repositories such as Zenodo.

All submissions will be assessed by an editor to determine whether they meet the aims and scope of this journal. Those considered to be a good fit will be sent for single-blind peer review before determining whether they will be accepted or rejected. Before making a submission, authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish any material included with the submission, such as photos, documents and datasets. All authors identified on the submission must consent to be identified as an author. Where appropriate, research should be approved by an appropriate ethics committee in accordance with the legal requirements of the study's country. An editor may desk reject a submission if it does not meet minimum standards of quality. Before submitting, please ensure that the study design and research argument are structured and articulated properly. The title should be concise and the abstract should be able to stand on its own.

Cover letter
Articles must be accompanied by a cover letter in PDF containing all of the below:

• Disclosure of any previous publications by the author(s) that overlap with the submission. If the submission is an extended version of an earlier conference paper, include that paper and describe the differences between the two papers. 
• Confirmation that all co-authors are aware of the current submission and consent to its review by IRRJ. 
• Declaration of possible conflicts of interest of any author with members of the editorial board. Conflicts of interest include family or close friends, graduate advisee/advisor, colleagues at the same institution or company, any collaboration in the past three years, or any other reason that you might feel a conflict.
• Full disclosure of generative AI used the research described in the submission, as well as writing of the submission.

 * IRRJ’s submission guidelines and editorial policies are based on the policies of sister journals like the Journal of Machine Learning Research, Transactions on Machine Learning Research the Journal of Artifical Intelligence Research, and ACM Transactions on Information Systems.