In Memoriam — Professor Judit Bar-Ilan
Professor Bar-Ilan Receiving 2018 Research in Information Science Award
It is with great sadness that the ASIS&T community learned of the passing of Professor Judit Bar-Ilan on July 16th.
Professor Bar-Ilan has been a highly engaged member of the ASIS&T community, having served on the Annual Meeting Program Committee in 2010 and the Cretsos Leadership Award Jury in 2015 and 2016. She chaired the Best JASIS&T Paper Jury in 2011. Most notably, Dr. Bar-Ilan received ASIS&T’s Research in Information Science Award in 2018.
Judit Bar-Ilan was a professor at the Department of Information Science of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She received her PhD in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and started her research in information science in the mid-1990s at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She moved to the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University in 2002. Her areas of interest included informetrics, information retrieval, Internet research, information behavior and usability.
“Dr. Judit Bar-Ilan is the 2018 recipient of the ASIS&T Research in Information Science Award. Bar-Ilan has made sustained contributions to informetrics, bibliometrics information retrieval, and most recently almetrics, domains at the core of information science. In particular, she has made significant contributions to enumerate and quantify alternative ways to assess the impact and visibility of scholarly communication and her work on search engine rankings and stability over time provides a comprehensive analysis of the reliability of search engines from the perspective of their end users.It seems only fitting to report Bar-Ilan’s h-indexes from web of science, scopus, and google scholar which are 30, 26, and 43 respectively. Her most cited paper entitled “Which h-index?—A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar” has been cited 259, 285 or 613 times (WoS, Scopus and Googles Scholar). Her JASIST article “Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source for alternative metrics” typifies Bar-Ilan’s knack of identifying an emerging issue coupled with the use of a rigorous experimental design to address the issue in an interesting and innovative way.
The ASIS&T Research in Information Science Award recognizes a systematic research program. Bar-Ilan’s sustained research efforts to quantify impact have important implications to individual researchers, search engines designers, and university officials. This work is particularly timely as the field continues to quantify and leverage new modes of communication and technologies that fundamentally change the way information is produced and consumed.”
Professor Bar-Ilan will be sincerely missed by her friends and colleagues at ASIS&T. We send our heartfelt condolences to her family.