Research fronts of computer science: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

Computer science and technology have developed rapidly in the past few decades and shown an increasing tendency of interdisciplinary research in the community. Research fronts of Computer Science (CS) have attracted the attention of scientists from different background and it is a big challenge for them to discover the development trends. The study uses scientometric methods and a combination of macro and micro analysis to detect the research fronts of CS based on the data from Scopus and Scival database. Macro analysis focuses on leading countries and institutions by scholarly output and citation count. Micro analysis pays attention to the performance of institutions and their competitors in research fronts and helps researchers understand frontier topics of specific research field. This paper provides a comprehensive and finer-grained analysis about the research frontier topics of CS domain. The insights obtained from the analysis are for both researchers and policy makers.