Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

1-2021

Abstract

The very nature of scientific inquiry encourages the flow of ideas across research domains in a discipline. Research topics with higher inter-domain presence tend to attract higher attention at individual and organizational levels. This is more pronounced in a discipline like computing, with its deeply intertwined ideas and strong connections with technology. In this paper, we study corpora of research publications across four domains of the computing discipline – covering more than 150,000 papers, involving more than 200,000 authors over 55 years and 175 publication venues – to examine the influences on inter-domain presence of research topics. We find statistically significant evidence that higher collective eminence of researchers publishing on a topic is related to lower inter-domain presence of that topic, fewer authors publishing on a topic relate to the topic being likely to have higher inter-domain presence, while topics belonging to more close-knit clusters of topics are likely to have lower inter-domain presence. Our results can inform decisions around defining and sustaining research agendas and offer insights on the progression of the computing discipline.

Keywords

statistical models, Computing, domains, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), research topics

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing

Volume

9

Issue

1

First Page

366

Last Page

378

ISSN

2168-6750

Identifier

10.1109/TETC.2018.2869556

Publisher

IEEE

Embargo Period

6-23-2021

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TETC.2018.2869556

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