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The Sydney ISSI 2001 Conference
Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau initiated this series of international conferences by organising the first conference in 1987 in Belguim. The idea of a conference was an experiment. 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. The first conference was called "International Conference on Bibliometrics and Theoretical Aspects of Information Retrieval". At that time, the idea of starting a continuous series of conferences nor of forming a professional association was far from their minds. However, history shows that there was significant interest and the first conference was followed by a second organised in 1989 by Jean Tague from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. By 1993, there were moves to create a professional association which was duly voted on by participants at the Berlin Conference. From that time on, the official name for conferences became International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics. These meetings of scientometric and informetric scholars from around the world have been held biennially since 1987. 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. |