Factors influencing research contributions and researcher interactions in software engineering: An empirical study

• Main Authors: DATTA, Subhajit, Sajeev, A. S. M., SARKAR, Santonu, KUMAR, Nishant
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Organizational Communication; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5664; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6667/viewcontent/apsec_research_contrib_factors_2013_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Research into software engineering (SE) education is largely concentrated on teaching and learning issues in coursework programs. This paper, in contrast, provides a meta analysis of research publications in software engineering to help with research education in SE. Studying publication patterns in a discipline will assist research students and supervisors gain a deeper understanding of how successful research has occurred in the discipline. We present results from a large scale empirical study covering over three and a half decades of software engineering research publications. We identify how different factors of publishing relate to the number of papers published as well as citations received for a researcher, and how the most successful researchers collaborate and co-cite one another. Our results show that authors with high publication rates do not concentrate on a few selected venues to publish, researchers with high publication rates behave differently from researchers of high citation rates (with the latter group co-authoring and citing their peers to a much lesser extent than the former), and collaborators citing each other's works is not a significant phenomenon in SE research.