An analysis of top author citations in software engineering and a comparison with other fields

Abstract

Ioannidis et al. provided a science-wide database of author citations. The data offers an opportunity to researchers in a field to compare the citation behavior of their field with others. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of citations describing the situation in software engineering and compare it with the fields included in the data provided by Ioannidis et al. For comparison, we take the measures used by Ioannidis into consideration. We also report the top-scientists and investigate software engineering researchers’ activities in other fields. The data was obtained and provided by Ioannidis et al. based on the Scopus database. Our method for analysis focuses on descriptive statistics. We compared software engineering with other fields and reported demographic information for the top authors. The analysis was done without any modifications to the ranking. In the later analysis, we observed that 37% of researchers listed as software engineers were not in the software engineering field. On the other hand, the database included a large portion of top authors (ca. 60% to 80%) identified in other software engineering rankings. Other fields using the database are advised to review the author lists for their fields. Our research’s main risk was that researchers are listed that do not belong to our studied field.

Impact of Software Engineering Research in Practice

“…Furthermore, looking at the CPC categories of SE patents citing SE research (Section 3.2) we observe that some of them (G06F8/31, G06F8/37, G06F8/41, G06F8/53) are associated with the aforementioned areas. Previous work has also demonstrated that SE researchers are very interested in human factors [29]. Consequently, it might be worth investigating in isolation the impact of cross-disciplinary and specialized SE areas to SE practice by studying more specialized venues, such as the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, the International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, the International Conference on Functional Programming, and the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.…”

“…A more recent assessment of top-cited SE researchers was conducted by Petersen and Ali [29] by analyzing a multi-field dataset of author citations provided by Ioannidis et al [30]. The authors report that 37% of top researchers of the dataset were mistakenly assorted in the SE field, while Barry Boehm is the leading SE author.…”

The Colombian scientific elite—Science mapping and a comparison with Nobel Prize laureates using a composite citation indicator

“…In their seminal study, Ioannidis et al [ 55 ] computed the composite citation indicator (henceforth: Ci ) for 84,000+ scientists from 12 fields (physics, mathematics, computer science, chemistry, earth sciences, engineering, biology/biotechnology, infectious disease, medicine, brain research, health sciences, and social sciences). Ci has also been used to compare software engineering with the multiple sub-fields of ‘information & communication technologies;’ to assess the scholarship of media experts on COVID-19 by gender and country; and to estimate the publishing output of COVID-19 and infectious disease experts across 174 research sub-fields [ 98 – 100 ]. In that line, Ci considers total impact; normalized coauthorship; and author order: ○ In the first are the number of citations and h index [ 101 ].…”