Discovering the rise and fall of software engineering ideas from scholarly publication data

• Main Authors: DATTA, Subhajit, SARKAR, Santonu, Sajeev A. S. M., KUMAR, Nishant
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Half-life; Publication; Software engineering research; Databases and Information Systems; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5575; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6578/viewcontent/Rise_fall_Software_Eng_Ideas_2015_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

For researchers and practitioners of a relatively young discipline like software engineering, an enduring concern is to identify the acorns that will grow into oaks -- ideas remaining most current in the long run. Additionally, it is interesting to know how the ideas have risen in importance, and fallen, perhaps to rise again. We analyzed a corpus of 19,000+ papers written by 21,000+ authors across 16 software engineering publication venues from 1975 to 2010, to empirically determine the half-life of software engineering research topics. We adapted existing measures of half-life as well as defined a specific measure based on publication and citation counts. The results from this empirical study are a presented in this paper.