Analysis of papers from twenty-five years of SIGIR conferences: what have we been doing for the last quarter of a century?

As part of the celebration of twenty-five years of ACM SIGIR conferences we performed a content analysis of all papers published in the proceedings of SIGIR conferences, including those from 2002. From this we determined, using information retrieval approaches of course, which topics had come and gone over the last two and a half decades, and which topics are currently "hot". We also performed a co-authorship analysis among authors of the 853 SIGIR conference papers to determine which author is the most "central" in terms of a co-authorship graph and is our equivalent of Paul Erdos in Mathematics. In the first section we report on the content analysis, leading to our prediction as to the most topical paper likely to appear at SIGIR2003. In the second section we present details of our co-authorship analysis, revealing who is the "Christopher Lee" of SIGIR, and in the final section we give pointers to where readers who are SIGIR conference paper authors may find details of where they fit into the coauthorship graph.