To train software engineers with principles of sustainable development: a bibliometric study

Abstract

Sustainability and environmental impact are important factors to consider in the software industry and especially in the training of the professionals who produce it. The non-renewable and increasingly limited resources of our planet generate the need to train engineers in the software area to assume their responsibility for sustainable development. Progress should be made in the inclusion of sustainable development principles in the curricula in the training of future software engineers. This article presents an analysis and monitoring of scientific publications, using bibliometric indicators in order to obtain and provide information on current research trends in the training of professionals in the area of software engineering with principles of sustainable development. For this reason, we conducted a bibliometric study of the Scopus database over the last 10 years, between 2010 and 2019, focusing on keywords such as software, education, teaching, learning, sustainable development and their respective variations. A systematic review method was used in this work, which produced an initial result of 581 papers. Subsequently, it was filtered through the thematic area of Computer Science, obtaining 232 documents. Subsequently, it was filtered by the Sustainable Development and education keywords, additionally filtering by documents type articles and conference publications for a result of 186 documents that resulted in 116 publications with at least one citation and 70 publications with zero citations. The analysis was performed using the search results analysis tool provided by Scopus and, in addition, VOSViewer as a tool to build and visualize bibliometric networks. The differential contribution of this study lies in the filtering, organization and analysis of 186 publications that allows it to be a source of bibliometric information that is expected to be an instrument that helps to focus future research in the area of sustainable software development. Overall and in accordance with the bibliometric indicators taken into account in this work, it is generally concluded that the Latin American region has very low impact production in the study area, than the areas of software engineering with the highest volume of Research related to sustainable development are requirements engineering, software design and architecture.