1. SIG-MET Distinguished Speaker Series: Opening Lecture by Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto
Speaker: Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto
Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto is Tom and Marie Patton Professor and School Chair in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research examines the formal and informal ways in which knowledge is produced, disseminated, consumed, and supported, with an emphasis on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Title: How to Be a Scientific Superpower
This talk explores the systemic factors and policy frameworks that enable nations and institutions to achieve scientific excellence and global influence in research. Drawing on her metascience research, Sugimoto explores how indicators around investments and production have been the primary drivers of what constitutes a "superpower". Weaving together historical evidence, she argues for indicators that consider diffusion and epistemic influence and demonstrates the current polycentric organization of global science. The conclusion will focus on how scientists, policymakers, and administrators can be more intentional in setting the global scientific agenda.
Lecture Guide:
Registration - https://www2.asist.org/events/Details/sig-met-invited-talk-1-1565651?sourceTypeId=Hub
Location - Online event, the lecture link will be sent to registered attendees via email.
Time - 9:00-10:00 am USA time on Friday, December 5th, 2025.
Sponsors:
2. SIG-MET Distinguished Speaker Series: Lecture by Dr. Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn
Speaker: Dr. Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn
Dr. Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn is a network and data scientist whose work combines network science, machine learning, and the study of complex social, biological, and information systems. He is a Quantitative Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science. Before joining UVA, he was a Professor at Indiana University’s CNetS, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and a Visiting Professor at MIT. Earlier, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and as a visiting researcher at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute after completing his PhD in Statistical Physics from KAIST. His research focuses on the architectures of complex systems—how networks shape behavior, cognition, and scientific progress—and on developing methods in network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing to investigate these mechanisms at scale. He is the co-author of Working with Network Data. His work has been recognized with several honors, including the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship.
Title: The Geometry of Science
What would scientometrics look like if scientific ideas lived in a concrete physical space? Deep representation learning now allows us to imagine such a shared knowledge embedding space where scholarly works, ideas, and other entities can coexist. Yet these powerful models are often black boxes, hard to translate into interpretable metrics. In this talk, I show that a fundamental understanding of embedding methods can make this space interpretable, allowing its geometry to be measured directly. The flow of scientists between institutions follows a gravity law governed by distance in the space, and scientific disruption can be captured through the geometric displacement of a field's trajectory — without relying on sparse local citation links. This embedding-based framework may offer a unified language for describing how science attracts, disrupts, and moves, complementing traditional citation-based indicators.
Lecture Guide:
Organizers:
- ASIS&T SIG-MET
- Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
- School of Information Management, Sun Yat-sun University
3. Call for Papers
[METSTI 2026]: ASIS&T METSTI Annual Symposium on Informetric, Scientometric, Scientific and Technical Information Research
To be held in conjunction with the ASIS&T Annual Meeting [Bangkok, Thailand, 6-10, November, 2026]
Overview
The ASIS&T Special Interest Group for Metrics (SIG-MET) and Special Interest Group on Scientific and Technical Information (SIG-STI) invite submissions for the combined METSTI 2026 Symposium on Informetric, Scientometric, Scientific and Technical Information Research, to be held as part of the ASIS&T Annual Meeting 2026.
This Symposium will provide a forum for researchers, practitioners, and students to present and discuss current research and emerging issues in metrics relevant fields including altmetrics, bibliometrics, scientometrics, webometrics, informetrics, and related issues about advancement of theories, methodologies, tools of scientific and technical information (STI) management and utilization.
The Symposium aims to foster interaction among participants at all career stages, encourage feedback on ongoing work, and build collaborations across institutions and regions.
Theme
The theme of this satellite meeting is Metrics and Sci-tech information in a Connected World. Building on the ASIS&T 2026 conference theme, this symposium examines how metrics can help us understand and foster connections across regions, languages, and disciplines.
Metrics provide valuable tools for examining crossboundary connections—such as how scientific teams form, how ideas from different fields combine, and how policies succeed in breaking down barriers. However, metrics also present challenges. The data underlying many metrics suffers from limited and biased coverage, and analytical techniques may obscure important connections when they do occur. Furthermore, the very act of measuring can shape what we're trying to understand: metrics can either reinforce existing boundaries or create incentives for crossing them.
This symposium welcomes applied, methodological, and theoretical contributions that explore how metrics can advance our understanding of cross-boundary connections or examine how measurement practices themselves influence collaboration, knowledge sharing, and equity across diverse communities and contexts.
Topics of Interest
We welcome submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Altmetrics (including social media metrics)
- Citation, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-authorship analysis
- Indicators and metrics for research evaluation (individual, institutional, national, global)
- Open science, open data, and their measurement
- Mapping of science and knowledge domains
- Patent and innovation indicators
- Bibliometricenhanced information retrieval and recommender systems
- Network analysis of scholarly communication and collaboration
- Responsible metrics, research assessment reforms, and policy implications
- Methodological advances (data sources, normalization, field delineation, classification, visualization)
- Tool development, platforms, and infrastructures for metric analyses
- Domain-specific or regional studies in scientometrics/ informetrics
- AI for science/scientometrics
- Research integrity
- Scholarly Communication
- Science, technology & innovation policy
- Social dimensions of metrics and their use
- Scientific and technical information for science
- Information for technical innovation
- Scientific and technical information for decision
- Information for interdisciplinary collaboration
- Scientific and technical information enable enterprise growth
- Scientific and technical information for industry innovation
- Scientific and technical information for regional growth
- Scientific and technical information management
- Scientific and technical information community
- Ethics of scientific and technical information
- Scientific and technical information users, behaviours
- AI for scientific and technical information mining, analysis
- Causal, cognitive reasoning of scientific and technical information
- Knowledge augmented generation of STI field
- Multimodal learning of scientific and technical information
- Intellectual property issues of scientific and technical information
- Scientific and technical information sharing and platform
Submissions presenting work in progress, early-stage ideas, or novel methodological approaches are especially encouraged.
Submission Types
We invite the following types of contributions:
1. Research Papers
- Completed or nearly completed research, including objectives, methods, data, results, and implications.
2. Work-in-Progress Papers
- Ongoing projects, preliminary results, or methodological ideas seeking feedback.
- Conceptual or theoretical contributions, critiques, visions for the field, or reflections on responsible and ethical uses of metrics.
- Short description of tools, platforms, datasets, or services related to scientometrics/ informetrics, including use cases and screenshots
Formatting
Submission System
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: [June 15th, 2026]
- Notification of acceptance: [July 15th, 2026]
- Camera-ready due: [August 1st, 2026]
- Symposium date: [November 8th, 2026, – during the Annual Meeting]
Late submissions and deadline extensions, if any, will be announced via the SIG-MET mailing lists, ASIS&T channels, and social media.
Review and Publication
All submissions will undergo peer review by the symposium academic and program committee, based on:
- Relevance to the symposium and SIG-MET
- Novelty and significance
- Methodological rigor
- Clarity of presentation
- Potential to foster discussion and future research
Accepted contributions will be:
- Presented at the symposium as talks, lightning talks, or demos (format assigned based on content and number of submissions).
- Included in ASIS&T SIGMET webpage/Zenodo if permitted by the authors.
Mode
- In-person
- Registration is handled via ASIS&T Annual Meeting registration. Additional symposium registration details will be available on the ASIS&T website.
Awards
- Top 25% submissions nominated for best paper awards, with certificate
- Top 3 best paper awards, $300, with certificate.
Organizers
Symposium Chair
- Jingzhu Wei, Sun Yat-sen University, China
- Houqiang Yu, Sun Yat-sen University, China
Academic Chair
- Dakota Murray, University of Albany, USA
- Haihua Chen, University of North Texas, USA
- Chenwei Zhang, Hong Kong University, China
- Lesego Makhafola, University of Pretoria, South Africa
- Priya Vaidya, Lovely Professional University, India
Program Chair
- Zhichao Fang, Renmin University of China, China
- Likun Cao, Purdue University, USA
- Jianhua Hou, Sun Yat-sen University, China
- Zachary Painter, Princeton University, USA
- Jocelyn Boice, Colorado State University, USA
On behalf of ASIS&T SIG-MET and SIG-STI.
Contact
For questions about submissions or the workshop, please contact:
[Zhichao Fang]: [fangz@ruc.edu.cn]
Subject line: “METSTI Symposium 2026”
