Analysis of co-authorship graphs of CORE-ranked software conferences

Abstract

In most areas of computer science (CS), and in the software domain in particular, international conferences are as important as journals as a venue to disseminate research results. This has resulted in the creation of rankings to provide quality assessment of conferences (specially used for academic promotion purposes) like the well-known CORE ranking created by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. In this paper we analyze 102 CORE-ranked conferences in the software area (covering all aspects of software engineering, programming languages, software architectures and the like) included in the DBLP dataset, an online reference for computers science bibliographic information. We define a suite of metrics focusing on the analysis of the co-authorship graph of the conferences, where authors are represented as nodes and co-authorship relationships as edges. Our aim is to first characterize the patterns and structure of the community of researchers in software conferences. We then try to see if these values depend on the quality rank of the conference justifying this way the existence of the different classifications in the CORE-ranking system.