Cross-disciplinary collaborations in data quality research

Data Quality has been the target of research and development for over four decades, and due to its cross-disciplinary nature has been approached by business analysts, solution architects, database experts and statisticians to name a few. As data quality increases in importance and complexity, there is a need to motivate the exploitation of synergies across diverse research communities in order to form holistic solutions that span across its organizational, architectural and computational aspects. As a first step towards bridging gaps between the various research communities, we undertook a comprehensive literature study of data quality research published in the last two decades. In this study we considered a broad range of Information System (IS) and Computer Science (CS) publication outlets. The main aims of the study were to understand the current landscape of data quality research, create better awareness of (lack of) synergies between various research communities, and, subsequently, direct attention towards holistic solutions. In this paper, we present a summary of the findings from the study that outline the overlaps and distinctions between the two communities from various points of view, including publication outlets, topics and themes of research, highly cited or influential contributors and strength and nature of co-authorship networks.