A bibliometric assessment of software engineering scholars and institutions (2010–2017)

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a bibliometric study, targeting an eight-year period (2010–2017), with the aim of identifying: (a) emerging research directions, (b) the top-20 institutions, and (c) top-20 early stage, consolidated, and experienced scholars in the field of software engineering. To perform this goal, we performed a bibliometric study, by applying the mapping study technique on top-quality software engineering venues, and developed a dataset of 14,456 primary studies. As the ranking metric for institutions, we used the count of papers in which authors affiliated with this institute have been identified in the obtained dataset, whereas regarding scholars we computed the corresponding rankings based on the number of published papers and the average number of citations. Finally, we identified the top-20 rising scholars in the SE research community, based on their recent publication record (between 2015 and 2017) and their research age.