A bibliometric analysis of the Turkish software engineering research community

Abstract

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the Turkish software engineering (SE) community (researchers and institutions). The bibliometric analysis has been conducted based on the number of papers published in the software-engineering-related venues and indexed in the Scopus academic search engine until year 2014. According to the bibliometric analysis, the top-ranked institution is Middle East Technical University, and the top-ranked scholar is Ayşe Başar Bener (formerly with Bogaziçi University and now with Ryerson University in Canada). The analysis reveals other important findings and presents a set of implications for the Turkish SE community and stakeholders (e.g., funding agencies and decision makers) such as the followings: (1) Turkey produces only about 0.49 % of the world-wide SE knowledge, as measured by the number of papers in Scopus, which is very negligible unfortunately. To take a more active role in the global SE community, the Turkish SE community has to increase their outputs. (2) We notice a lack of diversity in the general SE spectrum, e.g., we noticed very little focus on requirements engineering, software maintenance and evolution, and architecture. This denotes the need to further diversification in SE research topics in Turkey. (3) In total, 89 papers in the pool (30.8 % of the total) are internationally-authored SE papers. Having a good level of international collaborations is a good sign for the Turkish SE community. The highest international collaborations have been with researchers from United States, Canada and Netherlands. (4) In general, the involvement of industry in SE search is low. All stakeholders (e.g., government, industry and academia) should aim at increasing the level of industry-academia collaboration in the Turkish SE community, (5) Citation to Turkish SE papers, in general, are significantly lower than a set of three representative pools of SE papers. This is an area of concern which needs further investigation, and (6) In general, there is a need to increase both the quantity and quality of the Turkish SE papers, in the & Vahid Garousi global stage. The approach we use in this study could be replicated in other countries to provide insights and trends about the SE research performance in other countries.

A survey on software testability

“…We list in Table 5 and Table 6 the top 5 highly-cited papers based on two metrics: (1) absolute citation values, and (2) normalized citations (average citations per year). Both of these metrics are widely used in bibliometric studies, e.g., [44,45]. We can see that four papers appear in both top-5 lists.…”

“…In our review and mapping, we followed the standard process for performing systematic literature review (SLR) and systematic literature mapping (SLM) studies in software engineering. We performed the searches in both the Google Scholar database and Scopus (www.scopus.com), both widely used in review studies and bibliometrics papers, e.g., [44,45]. The reason that we used Scopus in addition to Google Scholar was that several sources have mentioned that: "it [Google Scholar] should not be used alone for systematic review searches" [46] as it may miss to find a subset of papers.…”

Finding Trends in Software Research

“…Geographical based bibiliometric studies on Turkish [14] and Canadian [18] SE communities were performed by Garousi et al to study the citation landscape in the respective countries. They identify a lack of diversity in the general SE spectrum, for example, limited focus on requirements engineering, software maintenance and evolution, and architecture.…”

Software-testing education: A systematic literature mapping

“…To find and select the papers for the SLM, we used both Google Scholar and Scopus. These are both widely used in many previous SLR and SLM papers in software engineering, e.g., [61][62][63][64]. The reason that we used Scopus in addition to Google Scholar was that several sources have mentioned that: "it [Google Scholar] should not be used alone for systematic review searches" [65] as it may not find all papers.…”