Understanding the inter-domain presence of research topics in the computing discipline

• Main Authors: DATTA, Subhajit, LAKDAWALA, Rumana, SARKAR, Santonu
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: statistical models; Computing; domains; latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA); research topics; Computer Sciences; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6001; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7004/viewcontent/2019ieeetetc_interdomainness_final_proof.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The very nature of scientific inquiry encourages the flow of ideas across research domains in a discipline. Research topics with higher inter-domain presence tend to attract higher attention at individual and organizational levels. This is more pronounced in a discipline like computing, with its deeply intertwined ideas and strong connections with technology. In this paper, we study corpora of research publications across four domains of the computing discipline – covering more than 150,000 papers, involving more than 200,000 authors over 55 years and 175 publication venues – to examine the influences on inter-domain presence of research topics. We find statistically significant evidence that higher collective eminence of researchers publishing on a topic is related to lower inter-domain presence of that topic, fewer authors publishing on a topic relate to the topic being likely to have higher inter-domain presence, while topics belonging to more close-knit clusters of topics are likely to have lower inter-domain presence. Our results can inform decisions around defining and sustaining research agendas and offer insights on the progression of the computing discipline.