Research Collaboration and Topic Trends in Computer

Academic publication metadata can be used to analyze the collaboration, productivity and hot topic trends of a research community. Recently, it is shown that authors with uninterrupted and continuous presence (UCP) over a time window, though small in number (about 1%), amass the majority of significant and high-influence academic output. We adopt the UCP metric to retrieve the most active authors in the Computer Science (CS) community over different time windows in the past 50 years, and use them to analyze collaboration, productivity and topic trends. We show that the UCP authors are representative of the overall population; the community is increasingly moving in the direction of Team Research (as opposed to Soloist or Mentor-mentee research), with increased level and degree of collaboration; and the research topics become increasingly inter-related. By focusing on the UCP authors, we can more easily visualize these trends.