Preliminary citation and topic analysis of international conference on agile software development papers (2002-2018)

Abstract

This study utilizes citation analysis and automated topic analysis of papers published in International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP) from 2002 to 2018. We collected data from Scopus database, finding 789 XP papers. We performed topic and trend analysis with R/RStudio utilizing the text mining approach, and used MS Excel for the quantitative analysis of the data. The results show that the first five years of XP conference cover nearly 40% of papers published until now and almost 62% of the XP papers are cited at least once. Mining of XP conference paper titles and abstracts result in these hot research topics: 'Coordination', 'Technical Debt', 'Teamwork', 'Startups' and 'Agile Practices', thus strongly focusing on practical issues. The results also highlight the most influential researchers and institutions. The approach applied in this study can be extended to other software engineering venues and applied to large-scale studies.