Abstract
Academic publication metadata can be used to analyze the collaboration, productivity and hot topic trends of a research community. In this paper, we study a specific group of authors, namely the top active authors. They are defined as the top 1% authors with uninterrupted and continuous presence in scientific publications over a time window. We take the top active authors in the Computer Science (CS) community over different time windows in the past 50 years, and use them to analyze collaboration, productivity and topic trends. We show that (a) the top active authors are representative of the overall population; (b) the community is increasingly moving in the direction of Team Research, with increased level and degree of collaboration; and (c) the research topics are increasingly inter-related. By focusing on the top active authors, it helps visualize these trends better. Besides, the observations from top active authors also shed light on design of better evaluation framework and resource management for policy makers in academia.
Highlights
As a research field established in the 1960s (Brookshear, 2011), Computer Science has gone through rapid development and become a mature field
The definition of Top Active Authors is based on the term “UCP author”, which was defined by Ioannidis, Boyack & Klavans (2014) in their study of publication metadata obtained from Scopus in a specific time window of 16 years
Starting from year 1988, the active window size needs to be set as 8, in order to make the percentage of top active authors among authors with at least one publication in that window around 1%
Summary
As a research field established in the 1960s (Brookshear, 2011), Computer Science has gone through rapid development and become a mature field. Much can be learned about the developments and trends in Computer Science by analyzing the publication metadata. The definition of Top Active Authors is based on the term “UCP author”, which was defined by Ioannidis, Boyack & Klavans (2014) in their study of publication metadata obtained from Scopus in a specific time window of 16 years. We might treat top active authors as the core of the community for the given time window. By analyzing their activities, we may get insights into the major trends of the whole community
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