Inbreeding in Software Engineering Conferences

A cornerstone of research is publishing: important research results must be made generally available for the research community, so that existing research can be exploited in new research and the community can share a common understanding of the research area. However, publishing is increasingly used as a basis of measuring the productivity of researchers and research institutes as well. This, together with the growing trend of using various metrics as a guiding instrument in academic funding and scientific evaluation, has led to a situation where a publication as such, independently of its contents, represents financial or prestige value for its authors [5]. Although most researchers are presumably motivated by genuine research challenges rather than by such secondary reasons, there is an obvious danger that researchers form inbreeding communities around publication forums, rewarding itself with publications and citations. This kind of development could take place without any conscious intentions. Inbreeding does not mean that the general quality of the publications would be decreased, in terms of argumentation, scientific methods, or presentation quality — on the contrary. It can be expected that such a community values and maintains a highly polished and scientifically solid format of publications. The main threat of inbreeding is not the decreasing quality of publications per se, but stagnation of the research approaches and increasing irrelevance of the publications with respect to the rest of the world. The degree of inbreeding in a certain research community is inherently difficult to study. Program committees generally follow strict rules as far as conflicting papers are concerned, effectively excluding single acts that could be seen as direct inbreeding. Thus, inbreeding is not directly visible in metrics, records and documents, but rather it takes place unconsciously in people’s minds. However, we argue that there are signs that indicate inbreeding trends in a research community. Since the authority that grants publications is a program committee (PC), a key role in the evolution of a research community is PC membership. This is emphasized by the fact that the PC membership itself is often regarded as a merit. Thus, in this study we will concentrate primarily on analyzing data related to the PC memberships. Our hypothesis is that two properties characterize a healthy, non-inbreeding research community as far as PC memberships are concerned: reasonable turnover of a PC, and non-favouring acceptance of papers submitted by PC members. We will focus on the data from six software engineering conferences in years 2004– 2009. The analysis is solely based on data publically available. We expect that the