The journal provides an international forum for the publication of theory, algorithms, analysis and experiments across the broad area of information retrieval. Topics of interest include search, indexing, analysis, and evaluation for applications such as the web, social and streaming media, recommender systems, and text archives. This includes research in areas such as human factors, artificial intelligence, and domain-specific challenges in information retrieval.
The ideal article may be theoretical, experimental, analytical or applied. A theoretical article will report a significant conceptual advance in the design of algorithms or other processes for some information retrieval task. It will establish the validity or potential validity of the proposed ideas in terms of their relation to already accepted ideas and/or in terms of some modest prototype experiment or simulation. An experimental article will report on a test of one or more theoretical ideas in a laboratory or natural setting. Experimental articles will be reviewed for both scientific and statistical merit and will be expected to discuss the limitations and generality of the reported results. Analytical articles will report on the results of analysis of data collected in settings such as user studies, surveys and log analysis. These articles will be reviewed based on statistical rigor, the novelty and generalizability of the findings, and the reproducibility of the methods. An application article will report the successful application of some already established technique to a significant real-world problem involving information retrieval.
The Information Retrieval Journal overlaps with a variety of technical and behavioral fields. Articles on such technical issues as compression and optimization, and on issues of human behavior and cognition are appropriate insofar as they bear specifically on the issues of methods, tasks or media as outlined above. Variations from these prototypes, such as critical reviews of existing work and significant tutorials will be considered if they make a clear contribution to the field. Preference will be given to articles which unify concepts across several traditional disciplinary boundaries, with specific application to problems of information retrieval.

Editors-in-Chief:
Leif Azzopardi, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK 
Tetsuya Sakai, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
Ryen W. White, Microsoft Research, USA
Editorial Board:
Azin Ashkan,Google Inc., USA
Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Microsoft Research, USA
Alejandro Bellogín, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain 
Michael Bendersky,Google Inc., USA
Peter Bruza, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
J. Shane Culpepper, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Gianluca Demartini, University of Queensland, Australia
Zhicheng Dou, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
Hui Fang,University of Delaware, USA
Eric Gaussier, University of Grenoble Alps, France 
Jiafeng Guo,University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Claudia Hauff,Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Makoto P. Kato, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Jaana Kekäläinen, University of Tampere, Finland
Diane Kelly, University of Tennessee, USA
Oren Kurland, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Yiqun Liu, Tsinghua University, China 
Edgar Meij, Bloomberg, UK
Massimo Melucci, University of Padua, Italy
Alistair Moffat, University of Melbourne, Australia
Josiane Mothe, Université de Toulouse, France
Vanessa Murdock, Amazon Research, USA
Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal, Canada
Edie Rasmussen, University of British Columbia, Canada
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands 
Stefan Rueger, The Open University, UK
Fabrizio Silvestri, Facebook, UK
Mark D. Smucker, University of Waterloo, Canada
Ruihua Song, Microsoft Research Asia, China 
Aixin Sun,Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Andrew Trotman, University of Otago, New Zealand
Ellen Voorhees, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
Arjen P. de Vries, Radboud University, The Netherlands 
Takehiro Yamamoto, University of Hyogo, Japan
Min Zhang, Tsinghua University, China
Justin Zobel, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Founding Editors:
Stephen Robertson, Microsoft Research, UK
Paul Kantor, Rutgers University, USA