Beyond a Western Center of Music Information Retrieval: A Bibliometric Analysis of the First 25 Years of ISMIR Authorship

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the music information retrieval (MIR) community has grown significantly in both the volume and diversity of research contributions. However, questions remain about who is represented within the community-and who is not. The influence of Western views shapes MIR research, affecting author representation, topic selection, cross-cultural considerations, and reproducibility. While discussions on the impact of Western centricity have gained traction in adjacent fields, there remains a need to critically assess its presence and limitations within MIR. This study analyzes the corpus of 2,458 ISMIR conference papers published from 2000-2024 to examine the geographic and institutional distribution of authors. Our findings indicate that International Society for Music Information Retrieval research remains Western-centric, with disproportionate representation from the Global North yet with increasing cross-institutional collaborations. We provide design suggestions to support a more geographically diverse authorship. In support of our findings and to facilitate future research, we release the aggregated data as an open dataset, ISMIR25Meta, along with a topic-based visualizer, ISMIR25Viz.

Authors

• Juan Sebastián Gómez-Cañón
• Erick Siavichay
• Doga Cavdir
• Blair Kaneshiro
• Lorenzo Porcaro