The journal provides an international forum for the publication of theory, algorithms, and experiments across the broad area of information retrieval. Topics of interest include search, indexing, analysis, and evaluation for applications such as text archives, social and streaming media, recommender systems, and the web. Research results published in the journal typically address the problems that arise for user-oriented tasks where the meaning as well as the explicit content of the data is of interest.

Information Retrieval Journal features theoretical, experimental and applied papers. Theoretical papers report a significant conceptual advance in the design of algorithms or other processes for some information retrieval task. Experimental papers detail a test of one or more theoretical ideas in a laboratory or natural setting. Application papers cover successful application of some already established technique to a significant real world problem involving information retrieval.

Information retrieval overlaps with a variety of technical and behavioral fields. As a result, the journal includes papers which unify concepts across several traditional disciplinary boundaries, with specific application to problems of information retrieval.