ISSI NEWSLETTER VOL. 16. NR. 1. © International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics EDITORIAL 1 ISSI NEWSLETTER VOL. 16. NR. 1. © International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics CONTENTS EDITORIAL Special Focus: The global COVID-19 challenge page 1 RESEARCH IN FOCUS K. Decock, K. Debackere, A. Vandamme, B. van Looy: Scenario-driven Forecasting: Lessons Learned from Mod- eling the COVID-19 Pandemic page 2 CONFERENCE REPORT Conference Report on ISSI2019 page 7 ARTICLES R. Rousseau: Interdisciplinar- ity of an Article as Measured through References: Is Scale- invariance Really Needed? page 17 P- Chi, Zs. Kosztyán, L. Gadár, V. Csányi, B. Thijs, A. Telcs, W. Glänzel: A Multilayer Network Analysis of Mobility and Collaboration in European University Research page 21 1 #61 / Volume 16 number 1 March 2020 quaterly e-newsletter of the international society for scientometrics and Informetrics ISSN 1998-5460 EDITORIAL SPECIAL FOCUS: THE GLOBAL COVID-19 CHALLENGE WOLFGANG GLÄNZEL 1 & LIN ZHANG 1, 2 1 ECOOM and Dept. MSI, KU Leuven, Belgium 2 School of Information Management, Wuhan University, China This number of the ISSI newsletter comes out with considerable delay. There were and still are severe reasons for that delay: The collection and preparation of the contributions for the present number was accompa- nied and overshadowed by the outbreak and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we decided to put a relevant article – on modelling the difusion patterns of COVID-19 and a scenario-driven thinking in forecasting the course of the pandemic – at the heart of the present issue of the Newsletter. The paper by Decock et al. (p. 2–6) is co-authored by our colleagues at KU Leuven. Extended versions and follow-ups of this con- tribution will be published in international scientifc journals very soon. In this context we would like to mention, that in a further article on COVID-19 ( Zhang, L., Zhao, WJ., Sun, BB., Huang, Y, Glänzel, W. (2020), How scientifc research reacts to international public health emergencies: a global analysis of response patterns, Scientometrics, in press ), the two authors of this editorial jointly study with their co-workers how scientifc research reacts to international public health emergencies. The article, which is to come in one of the next issues of the journal Scientometrics, provides the bibliometric characteristics and a comparative analysis of global academic response pat- terns to global public-health emergencies in previous pandemics/epidemics of this century with that experienced in the present situation of COVID-19. ISSI e-Newsletter (ISSN 1998-5460) is published by ISSI (http://www.issi-society.org/). Contributors to the newsletter should contact the editorial board by e-mail. • Wolfgang Glänzel, Editor-in-Chief: wolfgang.glanzel[at]kuleuven.be • Balázs Schlemmer, Managing Editor: balazs.schlemmer[at]gmail.com • Sarah Heefer, Assistant Editor: sarah.heefer[at]kuleuven.be • Judit Bar-Ilan • Sujit Bhattacharya: sujit_academic[at]yahoo.com • María Bordons: mbordons[at]cchs.csic.es • Juan Gorraiz: juan.gorraiz[at]univie.ac.at • Jacqueline Leta: jleta[at]bioqmed.ufrj.br • Olle Persson: olle.persson[at]soc.umu.se • Ronald Rousseau: ronald.rousseau[at]kuleuven.be • Dietmar Wolfram: dwolfram[at]uwm.edu Accepted contributions are moderated by the board. Guidelines for contributors can be found at http://www.issi-society.org/editorial.html. Opinions expressed by contributors to the Newsletter do not necessarily refect the ofcial position of ISSI. Although all published mate- rial is expected to conform to ethical standards, no responsibility is assumed by ISSI and the Editorial Board for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material therein.