  The combination of informetric analysis and information retrieval allows a
twofold application. (1) While in-formetrics analysis is primarily used to gain
insights into a scientific domain, it can be used to build recommen-dation or
alternative ranking services. They are usually based on methods like
co-occurrence or citation analyses. (2) Information retrieval and its
decades-long tradition of rigorous evaluation using standard document corpora,
predefined topics and relevance judgements can be used as a test bed for
informetric analyses. We show a preliminary experiment on how both domains can
be connected using the iSearch test collection, a standard information
retrieval test collection derived from the open access arXiv.org preprint
server. In this paper the aim is to draw a conclusion about the appropriateness
of iSearch as a test bed for the evaluation of a retrieval or recommendation
system that applies informetric methods to improve retrieval results for the
user. Based on an interview study with physicists, bibliographic coupling and
author-co-citation analysis, important authors for ten different research
questions are identified. The results show that the analysed corpus includes
these authors and their corresponding documents. This study is a first step
towards a combination of retrieval evaluations and the evaluation of
informetric analyses methods.
