Discovering the Rise and Fall of Software Engineering Ideas from Scholarly Publication Data

For researchers and practitioners of a relatively young discipline like software engineering, an enduring concern is to identify the acorns that will grow into oaks – ideas remaining most current in the long run. Additionally, it is interesting to know how the ideas have risen in importance, and fallen, perhaps to rise again. We analyzed a corpus of 19,000+ papers written by 21,000+ authors across 16 software engineering publication venues from 1975 to 2010, to empirically determine the half-life of software engineering research topics. We adapted existing measures of half-life as well as defined a specific measure based on publication and citation counts. The results from this empirical study are a presented in this paper.