Abstract
In this article we present a bibliometric study of 1.9 million computer science papers published from 1945 to 2014 and indexed in Web of Science. We analyze both the quantity and the impact of these publications according to document types, languages, disciplines, countries, institutions, and publication sources. The most frequent author keywords, cited references, and cited papers as well as the distribution of the number of references and citations per paper and of the age of cited references are also explored. Since conference proceedings play a tremendous role in this scientific field, we investigate the time and place of computer science conferences in terms of the most prolific months and locations. And, last but not least, the production of journal articles and conference papers over the whole time period and the level of collaboration in different computer science disciplines are inspected. One of the main results is the finding that “Artificial Intelligence” is the most productive subfield of computer science, but “Interdisciplinary Applications” has the highest relative impact.
Highlights
Computer science is a well-established, dynamic, and still relatively new research field that made its major breakthrough only some fifty years ago
Other investigations have been more concerned with the role of computer science conferences and their lower impact compared to journals [10–13] while some research has been devoted to the study of the citedness of computer science journals [14,15]
The Massachussetts Institutte of Technology (MIT) has, at the same time, the largest proportion of citations received (2.5%). This means that on average every 40th citation to a computer science publication refers to a paper co-authored by MIT researchers
Summary
Computer science is a well-established, dynamic, and still relatively new research field that made its major breakthrough only some fifty years ago. Nowadays, it is a highly interdisciplinary scientific domain having significant overlaps with mathematics, physics, and even biology. The research questions we wanted to answer can be summarized as follows: (1) What is the production and impact of computer science papers according to their document types, languages used, research areas, countries and institutions of their authors, and publication sources (venues)? (4) How did the production of journal articles and conference proceedings papers evolve over time in the period under study and how collaborative are the different computer science subfields? The research questions we wanted to answer can be summarized as follows: (1) What is the production and impact of computer science papers according to their document types, languages used, research areas, countries and institutions of their authors, and publication sources (venues)? (2) What are the most frequent author keywords, cited references, and cited papers and what do the distributions of the number of references and citations per paper and of the age of cited references look like? (3) Which are the most productive months of the year of computer science conferences and what are their most popular destinations? And (4) How did the production of journal articles and conference proceedings papers evolve over time in the period under study and how collaborative are the different computer science subfields? The topics deliberately not touched upon in this paper is an author-level analysis of any kind (for the reasons explained below) and a detailed investigation into collaboration patterns
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