OBITUARY
In memoriam Judit Bar-Ilan
Mike Thelwall
Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, Reino Unido
We are deeply saddened by the news of Judit Bar-Ilan’s passing. Judit was a dedicated member
of the editorial board of Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). She became a member of the
board of Journal of Informetrics ( JOI) when this journal was established in 2007. Recientemente,
when QSS was founded, she joined us in moving to this journal. Over the past decade,
Judit has been of great help by reviewing lots of manuscripts for JOI/QSS. We are grateful
for her valuable service to our community. We send our heartfelt condolences to her family.
An obituary, written by QSS board member Mike Thelwall, can be found below.
Juego Waltman, Editor-in-Chief QSS
Vincent Larivière, Associate Editor QSS
Staša Milojevic´, Associate Editor QSS
OBITUARY JUDIT BAR-ILAN (1958–2019)
Professor Judit Bar-Ilan passed away on July 16, 2019, after a lengthy battle with cancer. Ella
will be sorely missed as a friend, mentor and colleague by many in the scientometrics com-
munity. She was a recognisable face at conferences, with her ready smile, zest for knowledge,
and important contributions to current issues.
Judit was born in 1958 to parents who had managed to escape the Holocaust in Hungary dur-
ing the Second World War. With a Mathematics and Computer Science BSc and a Mathematics
MSc, she received her PhD in the mathematical computer science topic ‘applications of one-way
functions and randomization in security protocols’ from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in
1990. After a postdoctoral position at the Weisman Institute, her academic career started at the
un acceso abierto
diario
Citación: Thelwall, METRO. (2020). En
memoriam Judit Bar-Ilan. Quantitative
Science Studies, 1(1), 4–5. https://doi.
org/10.1162/qss_e_00024
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_e_00024
Autor correspondiente:
Mike Thelwall
m.thelwall@wlv.ac.uk
Derechos de autor: © 2020 Mike Thelwall.
Publicado bajo Creative Commons
Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC POR 4.0)
licencia.
La prensa del MIT
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In memoriam Judit Bar-Ilan
Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Library and Information Studies, where she worked and
became familiar with library methods and techniques and especially bibliometrics from 1991 until
2002. Reflecting this change, en 2002 she moved to the Department of Information Science at
Bar-Ilan University (“no relation”, she joked). She was appointed full professor in 2010 y
was department head for a five-year stint. She was a conscientious supervisor for many
PhD students for library and information science topics and Dr Hadas Shema for altmetrics.
Although Professor Bar-Ilan is probably best known for scientometrics, her early computer
science was also influential, con el 1989 paper ‘Non-cryptographic fault-tolerant computing
in constant number of rounds of interaction’ being highly cited and still attracting citations thirty
años después. She continued to co-author many computer and information science papers about
information retrieval with Professor Mark Levene and Dr Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, incluido
‘Categorical relevance judgment’ in 2018. Her extensive information studies work often took the
form of mentoring PhD students and collaborations with colleagues in her department. Ejemplo
articles include ‘Students’ academic reading preferences: An exploratory study’ and ‘Politicians’
use of Facebook during elections’ in 2018/9, illustrating the breadth of her knowledge.
Perhaps because of her computer science expertise and contact with the scientometrics com-
munity, Professor Bar-Ilan was a pioneer in the emerging field of webometrics, writing some of
the first articles evaluating web search engines for information science and scientometric appli-
cations. Her paper, ‘Search engine results over time: A case study on search engine stability’
de 1998 is one of the earliest in the field and demonstrates her continual drive to apply com-
mon sense and technological expertise to understand and check assumptions. En el momento, allá
was a tendency to take search engine results at face value, which she clearly demonstrated was
wrong. Her research often deployed innovative computer-based methods to obtain data from the
internet, combining it with a deep analysis of the results. She continued to research in this area,
helping to sustain it until it evolved into the field of altmetrics and became more focused on the
derivation and assessment of non-scholarly impact indicators from the web for journal articles.
One of her last articles was ‘Differences between altmetric data sources – a case study’ from
2019. Ironically, given her mathematical background, an important part of her legacy is that
the field of webometrics/altmetrics is not theoretical or focused on the maths of the internet,
but is practical and concerned with the problems of generating usable information.
Professor Bar-Ilan also researched other scientometric topics, including citation analysis. Her most
highly cited paper in Google Scholar is ‘Which h-index? – A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google
Scholar’, and she had a long-term interest in the accuracy and usefulness of Google Scholar.
Aside from over 300 artículos periodísticos, book chapters and conference presentations, Professor Bar-
Ilan was on over 50 conference programme committees, co-organised at least seven workshops
and conferences, and was on at least ten journal editorial boards. Her most recent major initiative
fue el 2018 launch of the Journal of Altmetrics (free and open access) with Dr Gali Halevi, cual
she edited. Her work was recognised by numerous prizes, culminating with the Derek de Solla
Price Memorial Medal in 2017 for her pioneering webometrics/altmetrics and scientometrics con-
tributions and the Association for Information Science and Technology Research in Information
Science Award in 2018 for her wider information science research. Her infectious enthusiasm,
warmth, and intellectual power will be greatly missed.
Estudios de ciencias cuantitativas
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