Software engineering research in Brazil from the perspective of young researchers: a panorama of the last decade

Abstract

Background: After graduating and starting a career as a professor, a young researcher usually finds him/herself lost due to a huge amount of new obligations and opportunities. Choosing the best strategy to guide his/her career into a productive and successful end is not an easy task to everyone, leading sometimes to anxiety and frustration. Previous studies on this topic looked only at published papers as the main source of analysis, lacking an analysis from the researchers’ perspective. Such analysis would be able to identify relevant researchers in the field and which decision and actions they took along their careers. Methods: We surveyed more than 30 researchers using snowball sampling and mining their profiles. Results: We identified patterns related to the universities and regions that formed and hired the most prominent Brazilian young researchers in software engineering. We also found patterns related to research areas (within software engineering), vehicles where research results were published, citations, and joint publication. Conclusions: We observed that the current generation of prominent researchers has graduated in the most important universities in Brazil and are still working (most of them) in Brazilian federal universities. Analyzing publication patterns, we observed that they target high-quality conferences and journals and usually collaborate strongly with a large number of peers. They also tend to establish themselves in a given research area and propose and develop workshops and conferences to promote the expansion of research on that area.