1.6 International Conferences of Bibliometrics

: Conferences are deeply connected to research fields, in this case bibliomet-rics. As such, they are a venue to present and discuss current and innovative research, and play an important role for the scholarly community. In this article, we provide an overview on the history of conferences in bibliometrics. We conduct an analysis to list the most prominent conferences that were announced in the newslet-ter by ISSI, the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Furthermore, we describe how conferences are connected to learned societies and journals. Finally, we provide an outlook on how conferences might change in future.


Introduction
Conferences are deeplyc onnected to research fields, in this case bibliometrics.As such, they are av enue to present and discuss current and innovative research, and playa ni mportant role for the scholarlyc ommunity.T hey alsos ervea sa venue to playavariety of roles, strengtheningthe so-called invisiblecolleges (Zuccala, 2006), and are important for gainings cientificr eputation (Söderqvist and Silverstein, 1994).Furthermore, conference awardsa nd committee memberships are a marker of prestige among scholars (Jeong,Lee and Kim, 2009).This chapter provides an overview on international conferences in bibliometrics, and what role they playin the history and institutionalization of bibliometrics.Proceedingsp apers are published in conference proceedings, and such proceedingsare also indexed, for example, since 1990 by the Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) (Sugimoto and Larivière, 2018) and in Scopus (Gingras, 2016).Apart from books and journal articles, proceedings papers have al ong tradition in disseminating research (Sugimoto and  Larivière, 2018), and are used as datasets for bibliometric (Glänzel et al., 2006;Lisée, Larivière, and Archambault,2008) and altmetric studies (Thelwall, 2019).On the one hand, not all conference proceedingsa re indexed, which makes such citation indexes sometimes incomplete ( Sugimoto and Larivière, 2018).On the other hand, some conferences publish their proceedingsa sj ournals pecial issues or books, which can lead to the indexingofproceedingspapers.Proceedings papers playaparticular role in naturals ciences and medicine (Ball, 2017).They represent an important means of publicationi nc omputer science (Fathalla et al. 2018), while they might be rather irrelevant in other disciplines, such as sociology ( Jeong,L ee and Kim, 2009).As such, they alsoc ontributet of aster knowledge sharing than journal articles.

AH istorical Sketch on Conferences in Bibliometrics
There are several examples of earlyconferences in bibliometrics.In 1946,two international conferences on scientific information werethe first events, organised by the Royal Society of London (Gingras, 2016).Thegoal wastodevelop new forms of indexing scientific literature.This was also related to the exponential amountofscientific literaturet hat led to the foundation of ac itation index as part of Garfield'sI nstitute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1963.The first international conference washeld in 1974,titled "Toward aMetric of Science: The Advent of the ScienceIndicators" (Gingras, 2016).1987i sc onsidered as the start of an ew erai ni nternational conferences, since apredecessor of the conferences organised by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) was held for the first time.
This led in 1993t ot he foundation of al earned society,n amelyI SSI (Gingras, 2016).Conferences, journals, and learned societies go in line with ac onsolidation of an academic discipline, as the foundation of the journal Scientometrics in 1978 demonstrates ( Gingras, 2016).Most conferences nowadays also experience other forms of scholarlyc ommunication, such as the live tweetinga bout conference presentations and discussions (Holmberg, 2015).Such tweets maya lso lead to collaborations for researchers that do not physicallya ttend ac onference (Holmberg, 2015).Furthermore, conference reports are often alsocommunicated via blogs.Other forms of communication are live streamso ra rchivedv ideos of conference presentations that are available on dedicated online platforms (Plank et al., 2019).

An Overview of International Conferences and itsR elation to Learned Societies
ISSI is one of the largest learned societies in bibliometrics, among others.Established in 1993byagroup of researchers during aconference in Berlin, the Netherlandsbased association coordinates the ISSI Conference, amembers' directory,ablog,and aquarterlynewsletter.Conferenceparticipants and society members getaccess to the ISSI conference proceedings,which contain all proceedingsp apers.I SSI alsoa dvocates for several international initiatives, such as the Initiative on Open Citations (I4OC), which has been supported by ISSI in an open letter (Sugimoto, Murray, and Larivière, 2018).
The influencebythe society on the researchfields can be observedbyits significant numberofm embers and conferencep articipants.The conferences used to run independently(ISSI, 2019), and in 2019 wereheld for the first time together with the European Network of Indicators Designers (ENID).The biennial conferenceisheld in different locations around the world, and the abovementioned first conferencei n 1987w as called "International Conferenceo nB ibliometrics and Theoretical Aspects of Information Retrieval".Ashappens oftenwithin the scholarlycommunity,anecdotal evidence suggests that the conference was started by ad iscussion between two researchers,and the question "Shouldn'twestart abiennial international conference on informetrics?"(ISSI, 2015).Since 1993i tb ears the samen ame as of today ( Hood and Wilson, 2001;I SSI, 2019).The conference is reported to be one of the world's largest and most prestigious conferences (Gorraiz et al., 2014).
Considering the influenceofISSI, the quarterlynewsletter is used as adataset to query past and ongoing international conferences in this researchf ield.Ar elated data collection method has been carried out,f or instance, by Söderqvist and Silverstein (1994) for conferences in immunologyand Jeong et al. (2009) for conferences in bioinformatics.The ISSI Quarterly Newsletter started in 2005,and published 59 issues until September 2019,a so fO ctober 28,2 019.A ll newsletters are publiclya vailable also for non-members.The newsletter in PDF has an ISSN and is curatedby10members of an editorial board accordingtoguidelines and potential authorsneed to submit proposals.This is to sayt he structure is rather similar to am agazine than to a newsletter.Apartfrom discussions on current research and the introduction of members as well as other news of the society,t he newsletter includes conference announcements,c all for papers and conference reports.Formats such as workshops, meetings, symposia,f orums, summers chools, PhDc ourses,s eminars, and other training courses wereexcluded from the selection in this article.All quarterlyn ewsletters since the start weredownloaded.This approach might have some limitations.Forexample, certain conferences might be excluded, because they werea nnounced somewhereelse.Still, the approach provides aglimpse into the world of conferences on bibliometrics.The conferences wereordered accordingtothe frequencyorstatus, and additional informationo nt heir listing in Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) as well as from conferencew ebsites was provided if available (see Table1 ).The conferences that were discontinued over time are not included in Table 1, except for the UK Social Networks Conferencethatwas mergedwith two other conferences.To the best of the authors' knowledge,therei snoc omprehensive discipline-specific database available that includes all conferences in bibliometrics, while there are several databases worldwide, for example discipline-specific ones, such as dblp computer science bibliography (Ley,2002).Generallyspeaking, these databases list proceedingspapers thatare linked to, for example, authorsand conferences.A part from the conferences mentioned in Table 1, one could add the Altmetrics Conference, an annual conference that provides av enue for research and other initiatives on altmetrics, that is metrics to track research articles online (Prieme ta l., 2010), but only the related Altmetrics Workshop was mentioned in the ISSI Quarterly Newsletter, and workshops were excluded from this selection.Other available databases on anational level might include the Brazilian Lattes Platform (Marques 2015) thats hows CVsofresearchers and theirpublications as well as the attendednationaland international conferences (Mugnaini et al., 2019).As imilar database might also be pro-vided by institutional, national or international CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) (Sivertsen,2019), such as DSpace-CRIS (Palmeretal., 2014)orVIVO (Börner et al., 2012;Conlon et al., 2019).Nevertheless, therea re certain ongoing initiatives that might provide in future am ore nuanced view on international conferences.One example is the ConfIDentplatform thatisdevelopedaspart of aresearch project fundedbythe German Research Foundation (DFG).The project objectiveist odevelop aW iki-based platformt hat takes into account the needs of scholarlyc ommunities, and offers ac urated list of conferences.B ys tructuringt he conference data according to requirementso fi nteroperability on the technicals ide and to academic demands on the social side, the system aims to present the possibility for as ociotechnical quality assessment of the content (Hagemann-Wilholt,P lank, and Hauschke, 2019;H agemann-Wilholt,2 019;S ens and Lange, 2019).Generallys peaking,proceedingsp apers mayalso be linked to ORCIDI Ds of researchers,that is personal identifiers (Dreyer et al.,2019).There are alsoo ther existing online platforms, such as Open Research (Fathalla et al., 2019) and ConfRef.Additionally, there are further initiativest od evelop persistent identifiers (PIDs) for conferences (Crossref, 2019).There are also initiativesu nderway to develop as emantic representation of scientificevents (Fathalla and Lange, 2018) in knowledge graphs,and to make structured queriesa vailable to the wider public (Fathalla, Lange, and Auer,2019a).Such datasetsmay alsobeused to rank conferences or explorethe impact of these events (Fathalla,Langeand Auer,2019b;Hansen and Budtz Pedersen, 2018;Hauschke, Cartellieri, and Heller,2 018;A ltemeier,2 019).

Conclusions
Conferences are important vehicles to disseminate research and to network with peers.Conferences aligned with journals and learned societies servea ni mportant role in the institutionalizationo fb ibliometrics.B ibliometricians and altmetricians also develop metrics basedo nd ata from conferences.There are ongoing initiatives to develop persistent identifiers for conferences.How will the future of conferences look like?Live streamingand other online tools,among others, might have changed the importance of traveling to conferences,and social media makes it possible to join the discussion remotely, but conferences willmostprobablyremain prominent in the academic world, because the social component of meeting other researchers is one of the most importanta spects.However,t he climate crisis and coronavirus pandemic will most probablyr equire fundamental changes for most academic conferences, and will accelerate digital alternatives and make it less necessary to physicallyattend these events (Viglione, 2020).
GrischaF raumann,R esearch Assistant at the TIBL eibniz Information Centref or Science and Technology in the R&D Department, PhD Fellow at the University of Copenhagen in the Departmento fC ommunication, ResearchA ffiliatea tt he "CiMetrias: ResearchG roup on Science and Technology Metrics" at the University of São Paulo( USP), gfr@hum.ku.dkRogério Mugnaini,P rofessor of Library and Information Science at the Universityo fS ão Paulo (USP), whereh el eads the research group "CiMetrias: Research Group on Science and Technology Metrics",m ugnaini@usp.brElíasS anz-Casado,F ull Professor in the Departmento fL ibrary and Information Science at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Director of the research group "Laboratoryf or Metric Information Studies" (LEMI), leads the "Research Institutef or Higher Education and Science" (INAECU)w hich is made up of members of Carlos III University of Madrid and Autonomous University of Madrid, elias@bib.uc3m.es International conferences in bibliometrics( N =11) ordered by frequency/ status including information on their listing in CPCI (source: ISSIQ uarterly Newsletter March 2005 until September 2019, number 1 -59, retrieved from http://issi-society.org/publications/issinewsletter/ [July 15, 2020]).