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Call for IR for Good Papers

Call for “IR for Good” Papers

The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) is the premier European forum for new research in Information Retrieval (IR). As societal concerns such as algorithmic bias, fairness, privacy, and transparency increasingly influence advancements in responsible IR, their significance resonates across various disciplines including philosophy, law, sociology, and civil society, extending beyond mere technical aspects. Building on last year’s achievements, these themes will be explored for the second time in a special track titled “IR for Good.”

The “IR for Good” track at ECIR is dedicated to gathering impactful, high-quality research within this domain, fostering a common platform for engagement among researchers, practitioners, and civil society from various backgrounds and sectors. Moreover, getting the industry involved ensures that stakeholders gain from these interdisciplinary exchanges, highlighting how societal factors affect industry practices. Our focus is to facilitate discussions on recent progress toward developing fair, transparent, ethical, inclusive, and sustainable IR practices.

Topics of Interest

We invite contributions that explore new positions, methods, tools, techniques, and experiments that address fairness, accountability, transparency, societal impact, sustainable development, and ethics in IR, ideally from a multifaceted and interdisciplinary viewpoint. We welcome both technically focused contributions and those exploring broader societal dimensions such as philosophy, law, or sociology. Specific areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Accessibility in IR platforms
  • Algorithmic fairness and bias in IR
  • Accountability and ethical issues in IR
  • Challenges of fake news, hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation in IR
  • Credibility and reputation in IR
  • Cultural and linguistic variability in IR
  • Definitions and concepts of fairness
  • Ethical frameworks for IR platforms and data
  • Ethical implications of artificial intelligence enhancing IR
  • Fairness assessment and evaluation protocols for IR, including data considerations
  • Human-centric impacts of IR algorithms
  • IR in crisis management
  • IR models interpretability and explainability in support of better decision making
  • IR technologies’ contributions to UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals
  • Legal considerations and audits in the application and analysis of IR
  • Methods to counteract bias and unfairness in IR
  • Participatory studies to delineate explanatory needs and frameworks
  • Philosophical considerations in the use of IR
  • Privacy-enhancing techniques in IR
  • Replicability and transferability of IR models in data-scarce and vulnerable settings
  • Robustness and security of IR algorithms
  • Sociological impacts and influences related to IR
  • The impact of IR on employment

Submission Guidelines

The “IR for Good” track provides the opportunity for researchers to present state-of-the-art research on the track topic, which makes, or has the potential to make, a significant contribution to the field.

  • Full papers are up to 12 pages in length plus additional pages for references. Appendices count toward the page limit. Please put appendices before the references for paper submission.
  • Short papers are up to 6 pages in length plus additional pages for references. Appendices count toward the page limit. Please put appendices before the references for paper submission.

All submissions must be written in English. All papers should be submitted electronically through the EasyChair submission system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecir2025). Select the “IR for good” track.

For the preparation of their papers, the authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). Please also note that Springer encourages the authors to include their ORCIDs in their submitted papers (https://www.springer.com/gp/authors-editors/orcid). Once the paper has been submitted, changes relating to its authorship cannot be made. Submissions will be refereed via a double-blind peer review, with an initial first-stage review followed by a second stage of discussion.

Accepted papers will be published in the main conference proceedings in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The corresponding author of each accepted paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. The proceedings will be distributed to all delegates at the conference. The accepted papers will have to be presented at the conference and at least one author for each accepted paper is required to register.

Dual Submission Policy

Papers submitted to “IR for Good” at ECIR 2025 should be substantially different from papers that have been previously published, accepted for publication, or that are under review at other venues.

Exceptions to this rule are:

  • Submission is permitted for papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings.
  • Submission is permitted for papers that have previously been made available as a technical report or preprint (e.g., in institutional archives or preprint archives like arXiv). However, we discourage this since it places anonymity at risk; in particular, please do not publish your paper at arXiv and submit it to ECIR at the same time, some days before, or during the reviewing period of ECIR.
  • If your paper is already available as a technical report or preprint:
    • You might not want to use the same title and abstract for your ECIR submission (in case of acceptance at ECIR, the title of your submission still might be changed “back”).
    • Please do not cite your technical report or preprint and make some effort to avoid any issues that may harm the double-blindness of your submission. Reviewers will receive guidance that asks them to refrain from trying to break blindness if at all possible too, but be aware that the availability of a technical report for an ECIR submission can cause issues.

Ethics and Professional Conduct

“IR for Good” at ECIR 2025 expects the authors (as well as the PC, and the organising committee) to adhere to accepted standards on ethics and professionalism in our community,  namely:

“IR for Good” Track Dates

  • “IR for Good” paper abstract submission: October 30, 2024, November 3, 2024. 11:59pm (AoE)
  • “IR for Good” paper submission: November 6, 2024, November 10, 2024, 11:59pm (AoE)
  • “IR for Good” paper notification: December 16, 2024

“IR for Good” Track Chairs

  • Ludovico Boratto (University of Cagliari, Italy)
  • Mirko Marras (University of Cagliari, Italy)
  • Suzan Verberne (University of Leiden, the Netherland)
  • Contact: ecir2025-ir4good AT easychair.org