Funded and Non-Funded Research Literature Production in Software Engineering: Analysing of Funding Acknowledgements
Peter Kokol · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018
Context: Since funding acknowledgements started to be added to bibliographic database records, bibliometric analysis has been used to identify funding patterns in research literature production. However, no such analysis has yet been done for Software Engineering. Objective To close the gap, we performed a study in which we analysed research articles’ metadata and the funding information, retrieved from funding acknowledgments, to identify Software Engineering literature production trends and the impact of various country indexes on the production. Method: The bibliometric research papers were harvested from Web of Science database. For each paper, we extracted the author’s affiliation, publication year, and, for funded papers, also the funding acknowledgement. We analysed and visualised trends for funded and all papers’ production. The influence of country factors on the research literature production was analysed using the SPSS Version 24 (IBM, USA) Regression Automatic Linear Modelling. Results and Conclusions: We analysed 178,668 papers, among which there were 57,677 (32,3%) funded papers (37,3% in G9 countries). China was the most productive country in terms of funded and USA in total literature production. Overall, the literature production trends were positive, and the falls in production in 2010 and 2015 might be due to the economic crises. GPD or GPD per capita were the most important factors impacting SE research literature production. The productivity was regionally centered, namely, the five most productive countries produced more than 70% of funded and non-funded papers.