Analyzing Citation Frequencies of Leading Software Engineering Scholars

Abstract

It is understandable that sponsors of research activities are interested in assessing the work of scholars they (plan to) support although this is not a simple undertaking. Until today, there is no obvious approach for objectively measuring and comparing the quality of research results from different disciplines. Hence, counting publications has been used for long time as a substitute to deal with this challenge and only recent technological advances have fostered the usage of so-called citation indices (such as the h-index) for this purpose. Although this approach is as disputed as all previous ideas in this context, we feel it is about time to investigate the expressiveness of modern citation analysis approaches in computer science more closely. In order to do that, we have chosen the area of software engineering and created a first comprehensive ranking, illustrating citation values of world class scholars by analyzing the work of almost 700 researchers in this field. We have found that top h-index scores in software engineering are around 60 while top-notch g-indices start at around 130 when Google Scholar and Publish or Perish, the quasi standard tools for this purpose are used. Clearly, the results of our study are influenced by the coverage of these tools so that we have also analyzed Google Scholar and found it having a very high coverage of software engineering publications. Hence we are convinced to have collected good quality results that will allow our community to better judge and use citation numbers in the future.

A pragmatic means for measuring the complexity of source code ensembles

“…The h-index of an author is then equal to the rank where the number of citations is at least as large as the rank. As an example consider the h-index of Barry Boehm in late 2011, where this was the case on rank 53 as shown in TABLE III on the next page (data taken from Hummel et al [13]). …”

Finding Trends in Software Research

“…Since these studies were localized to a certain country, it explored lesser number of papers Citation based studies have also evolved into adoption of measures such as h-index and g-index to study the success of an SE researcher. Hummel et al in 2013 analyzed the expressiveness of modern citation analysis approaches like h-index and g-index by analyzing the work of almost 700 researchers in SE [25]. They concluded that on an average h-index for a top author is around 60 and g-index is about 130.…”

Text and Team: What Article Metadata Characteristics Drive Citations in Software Engineering?

“…For another, several bibliometric studies attempted to identify not top papers but top scholars and institutions in the field of software engineering in various geographies. Garousi and Varma [24], for instance, performed such an analysis for Canada, whereas Hummel et al [32] took a global approach and ranked highly influential software engineering scholars who were program committee or organizing committee members of reputable software engineering venues or ACM SIGSOFT research award winners. Other authors fused these two substreams of research, reporting on both top papers and scholars [14].…”