Analyzing 5 years of EC-TEL proceedings Wolfgang Reinhardt1, Christian Meier1, Hendrik Drachsler2, and Peter Sloep2 1 University of Paderborn Department of Computer Science, Computer Science Education Group Fuerstenallee 11, 33102 Paderborn, Germany {wolle,chrmeier}@upb.de 2 Open University of the Netherlands Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies 6401 DL Heerlen, The Netherlands {Firstname.Lastname}@ou.nl Abstract. Over the past five years, EC-TEL has established itself as a major conference on learning with and through technology. Nearly 600 researchers have contributed about 230 full and short papers on various topics in the domain of Technology Enhanced Learning. In this paper we analyze the contributions of five years of EC-TEL and identify prolific authors, successful co-author-networks and most cited publications. The analysis reveals a very fragmented EC-TEL community that is strongly influenced by a relatively small set of authors. Keywords: research 2.0, bibliometrics, awareness, visualization 1 Introduction Scholarly practice focuses on the improvement of the society and therefore con- ducts research on pressing problems. The daily work process of researchers can be roughly distinguished into reviewing and reflecting new publications, preparing experiments, and publishing the results and the data on scientific conferences or in international journals. Over centuries researchers have gathered around recent publications that served as boundary objects between different communities of practice and reciprocally influenced each other’s work. With today’s unmanage- able amount of published work it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor one’s own research domain and to find relevant publications that concur with one’s own interests and research projects. In the past years research has explored col- laboration of scientists by means of co-authorships of publications. In the TEL community, such endeavors were undertaken for example in [2,5,7]. We argue that structured analyses of scientific publications and visualizations synthesiz- ing the results can help all interested stakeholders in the scientific process to be more aware about content and connections and thus may serve as decision support. The EC-TEL started as a European conference on Technology Enhanced Learning in 2006. The aim of the founders was to provide a unique forum for

2 Reinhardt, Meier, Drachsler, Sloep research related to Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe and world-wide [6]. The topics of the conference are dealing with e-learning, knowledge management, and workplace learning. With an acceptance rate of about 20% EC-TEL has established itself as one of the main conferences in the domain of Technology Enhanced and E-Learning. In this paper we present a bibliometric and scientometric analysis of the published full and short papers of the 5 years of EC-TEL. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: In Section 2 we present the research question that guided our work. In Section 3 we discuss how the data was obtained and processed. In Section 4 we present the results of our analyses and thereafter in Section 5 we report some limitations of the conducted study. Finally in Section 6, we discuss implications and opportunities for future research and draw some requirements for a future scientific event management system. 2 Research question The analyses in this article are carried out in order to understand how the EC- TEL conference series can be described using bibliometric and scientometric measures. Moreover, we aim at raising awareness about peculiarities in the an- alyzed data with the goal to show the fissured EC-TEL community. The overall research question of this paper can thus be stated as “Which awareness sup- port functions can be derived from the analysis of the EC-TEL publications to improve the support of conference organizers and attendees?” 3 Data collection and processing The papers analyzed in this study have been collected from the Digital Library of Springer [10]. All full and short papers of the 5 years of EC-TEL were downloaded in PDF format and used for the following analyses. Poster papers, invited papers and keynote abstracts have not been considered in the study. Altogether we analyzed 229 papers from 574 unique authors. On average there were 46 papers in each year of the conference with 148 unique authors per year. Each year the authors referenced 751 unique publications in their accepted papers. 3.1 Processing and analysis preparation The extraction and cleaning of bibliographic data was one of the most complex and time-consuming steps in the processing of the data. First, we used an open source command-line tool called pdftotext which is available for many Linux distributions [3]. Pdftotext allows to extract the plaintext from PDF files, which is the prerequisite for the analysis in the next step: the analysis using ParsCit [1]. ParsCit extracts metadata about the given publication itself and about the contained references. As the output of ParsCit is not always correct and some metadata might be extracted wrongly, a manual cleaning of the metadata was