This special issue brings together eight papers from experts of communities which often have been perceived as different once: bibliometrics, scientometrics and informetrics on the one side and information retrieval on the other. The idea of this special issue started at the workshop “Combining Bibliometrics and Information Retrieval” held at the 14th International Conference of Scientometrics and Informetrics, Vienna, July 14-19, 2013. Our motivation as guest editors started from the observation that main discourses in both fields are different, that communities are only partly overlapping and from the belief that a knowledge transfer would be profitable for both sides. Hereby, we were inspired by the bibliometric analysis of the broader field of Library and Information Science done by White and McCain (1998).The discussions during the ISSI workshop in Vienna and the papers in this special issue highlighted the following features of distinction:The audiences served by IR and scientome ...