The growth in all aspects of research in the last decade has led to a multitude of new publications and an exponential increase in published research. Finding a way through the excellent existing literature and keeping up to date has become a major time-consuming problem. Electronic publishing has given researchers instant access to more articles than ever before. But which articles are the essential ones that should be read to understand and keep abreast with developments of any topic? To address this problem Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval - FnTIR publishes high-quality survey and tutorial monographs of the field using modern techniques to enable both instant linking to the primary research in its electronic form and affordable paper copies, finally delivering on the promise to authors of multiple channel publishing from a single source. Each issue of Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval - FnT IR comprises a 50-100 page monograph written by research leaders in the field. Monographs that give tutorial coverage of subjects, research retrospectives as well as survey papers that offer state-of-the-art reviews fall within the scope of the journal. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval will publish survey and tutorial articles on the following topics: Applications of IR Architectures for IR Collaborative filtering and recommender systems Cross-lingual and multilingual IR Distributed IR and federated search Evaluation issues and test collections for IR Formal models and language models for IR IR on mobile platforms Indexing and retrieval of structured documents Information categorization and clustering Information extraction Information filtering and routing Metasearch, rank aggregation and data fusion Natural language processing for IR Performance issues for IR systems, including algorithms, data structures, optimization techniques, and scalability Question answering Summarization of single documents, multiple documents, and corpora Text mining Topic detection and tracking Usability, interactivity, and visualization issues in IR User modelling and user studies for IR Web search