ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) seeks previously unpublished papers on information retrieval (such as search engines, recommender systems, conversational search agents) that contain:

new principled information retrieval models or algorithms with sound empirical validation;
observational, experimental and/or theoretical studies yielding new insights into information retrieval or information seeking;
accounts of applications of existing information retrieval techniques that shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques;
formalization of new information retrieval or information seeking tasks and of methods for evaluating the performance on those tasks;
development of content (text, image, speech, video, etc.) analysis methods to support information retrieval and information seeking;
development of computational models of user information preferences and interaction behaviors;
creation and analysis of evaluation methodologies for information retrieval and information seeking; or
exceptionally well-written surveys of existing work that propose a significant synthesis.