Understanding teams and productivity in information retrieval research:Academia,industry,and cross-community collaborationsOA

Purpose:Prior Information Retrieval(IR)research synthesizes progress from individual studies,yet academia-industry collaboration dynamics remain unexplored.This study investigates:(1)productivity patterns and venues,(2)citations-downloads relationships,(3)topic evolution,and(4)collaboration trends.Design/methodology/approach:We perform an analysis of 53,471 ACM IR papers(2000–2018)using bibliometrics and DistilBERT topic modeling.Findings:We find that industry-involved papers preferred WWW/CIKM venues;collaborations dominated RecSys/CSCW.We see that academia-industry collaborations achieved the highest download-to-citation conversion rates.Academia focused on algorithms;industry on applications;collaborations bridged both with rising human-centered themes.Research implications:This is a pioneering large-scale bibliometrics revealing collaboration’s impact on IR knowledge evolution and provides a methodological framework for cross-sector analysis.Practical implications:The paper identifies optimal venues(RecSys/CSCW)for partnerships and guides joint initiatives(shared datasets,grants)to bridge academia-industry divides and enhance research translation.Originality/value:This is the first large-scale bibliometric analysis of IR academia-industry collaboration.The paper finds many novel insights,including the fact that collaboration boosts citation efficiency,enables complementary specialization,and drives topic convergence.