Abstract
Ioannidis et al. provided a science-wide database of author citations. The data offers an opportunity to researchers in a field to compare the citation behavior of their field with others. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of citations describing the situation in software engineering and compare it with the fields included in the data provided by Ioannidis et al. For comparison, we take the measures used by Ioannidis into consideration. We also report the top-scientists and investigate software engineering researchers’ activities in other fields. The data was obtained and provided by Ioannidis et al. based on the Scopus database. Our method for analysis focuses on descriptive statistics. We compared software engineering with other fields and reported demographic information for the top authors. The analysis was done without any modifications to the ranking. In the later analysis, we observed that 37% of researchers listed as software engineers were not in the software engineering field. On the other hand, the database included a large portion of top authors (ca. 60% to 80%) identified in other software engineering rankings. Other fields using the database are advised to review the author lists for their fields. Our research’s main risk was that researchers are listed that do not belong to our studied field.
Highlights
Research question 1 (RQ1, C1): How do author citations in software engineering compare to other fields concerning the citation measures provided by Ioannidis et al.?
The results present the answers to the research questions, namely comparison with other fields (RQ1) and after that the detailed analysis of top authors in software engineering (RQ2)
We analyzed the top-ranked software engineering researchers in the database published by Ioannidis et al The database provided the opportunity to gain novel insights on the top authors in software engineering, as a new measure was used to identify the authors (Composite Citation index), and that the ranking was considering the number of self-citations
Summary
Scientific measures are collected on various levels, for example, to assess institutions (Karanatsiou et al 2019), scientific publication forums (Pendlebury and Adams 2012), impact of particular publications (Garousi and Fernandes 2016), and individual researchers (Karanatsiou et al 2019),(Karanatsiou et al 2019). The rankings in software engineering investigated the contributions of researchers using different measures. For the most recent edition of the JSS ranking, the counting rules and measures were changed. The new ranking included more publication forums, and author citations were considered. Another recent assessment of top authors in software engineering was presented by Fernandes (2014). Fernandes used two different measures to rank the researchers: fractional and harmonic authorship credit (cf Hagan Hagen 2014). Just considering the software engineering field, different rankings use different measures and obtain the basis for ranking (selected publication forums) in different ways
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