A decade of database conferences: a look inside the program committees

Abstract

Database management technology has played a vital role in facilitating key advancements of the information technology field. Database researchers--and computer scientists in general--consider prestigious conferences as their favorite and effective tools for presenting their original research study and for getting good publicity. With the main aim of retaining the high quality and the prestige of these conference, program committee members plays the major role of evaluating the submitted articles and deciding which submissions are to be included in the conference programs. In this article, we study the program committees of four top-tier and prestigious database conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT) over a period of 10 years (2001---2010). We report about the growth in the number of program committee members in comparison to the size of the research community in the last decade. We also analyze the rate of change in the membership of the committees of the different editions of these conferences. Finally, we report about the major contributing scholars in the committees of these conferences as a mean of acknowledging their impact in the community.