  This special issue brings together eight papers from experts of communities
which often have been perceived as different once: bibliometrics,
scientometrics and informetrics on the one side and information retrieval on
the other. The idea of this special issue started at the workshop "Combining
Bibliometrics and Information Retrieval" held at the 14th International
Conference of Scientometrics and Informetrics, Vienna, July 14-19, 2013. Our
motivation as guest editors started from the observation that main discourses
in both fields are different, that communities are only partly overlapping and
from the belief that a knowledge transfer would be profitable for both sides.
