Conferences Meetings of scientometric and informetric scholars from around the world have been held biennially since 1987. (In the intervening year, there is generally a Conference on Science & Technology Indicators organised by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden, NL).
Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau organized the first bibliometric Conference in 1987 in Diepenbeek, Belgium. Their idea at that time was only to gather like-minded scholars and thereby to gauge the strength of interest in this field. Egghe and Rousseau were unsure of whether there were sufficient numbers of scholars interested in this emerging field of research to support a single conference, let alone be the first of a series. The first conference was called “International Conference on Bibliometrics and Theoretical Aspects of Information Retrieval”. At that time, there were no plans for starting a continuing series of conferences nor of forming a professional association. However, history shows that there was significant interest and it was decided early on that others should follow. The second conference was organised in 1989 by Jean Tague from the University of Western Ontario in Canada and the third in 1991 by Ravichandra Rao in Bangalore, India. By 1993, there were moves to create a professional association. The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) was voted into existence by participants at the Berlin Conference. From that time on, the official name for conferences became International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics.

It has become somewhat of a tradition that host countries will alternate among ‘old’ world countries of the Northern Hemisphere and ‘new’ world countries, predominantly in the Southern Hemisphere. On examining the list of conferences and host countries, you will see that the idea of north-south/east-west distribution of conferences has been upheld, even if not to the letter of strict geography. This distribution of locations of the conferences gives opportunities for host countries to encourage and showcase scientometric and informetric research in their home institutions to an international audience. Further, each host country has the privilege of introducing their country and its research to a range of international scholars as well as being able to invite a range of its own scholars who might otherwise not have been able to attend. The conferences stimulate the kind of scholarly conversations that may lead to international collaboration and lead to better understanding and interaction among the international community of scientometric scholars.

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