Analysing the evolution of computer science events leveraging a scholarly knowledge graph: a scientometrics study of top-ranked events in the past decade

Scientometrics (2021 )Cite this article

The publish or perish culture of scholarly communication results in quality and relevance to be are subordinate to quantity. Scientific events such as conferences play an important role in scholarly communication and knowledge exchange. Researchers in many fields, such as computer science, often need to search for events to publish their research results, establish connections for collaborations with other researchers and stay up to date with recent works. Researchers need to have a meta-research understanding of the quality of scientific events to publish in high-quality venues. However, there are many diverse and complex criteria to be explored for the evaluation of events. Thus, finding events with quality-related criteria becomes a time-consuming task for researchers and often results in an experience-based subjective evaluation. OpenResearch.org is a crowd-sourcing platform that provides features to explore previous and upcoming events of computer science, based on a knowledge graph. In this paper, we devise an ontology representing scientific events metadata. Furthermore, we introduce an analytical study of the evolution of Computer Science events leveraging the OpenResearch.org knowledge graph. We identify common characteristics of these events, formalize them, and combine them as a group of metrics. These metrics can be used by potential authors to identify high-quality events. On top of the improved ontology, we analyzed the metadata of renowned conferences in various computer science communities, such as VLDB, ISWC, ESWC, WIMS, and SEMANTiCS, in order to inspect their potential as event metrics.

Scientific communication is intended as a knowledge exchange ecosystem. Scholars disseminate their research results by publishing written documents. This way of communication has developed over time and consists of certain steps and involves corresponding stakeholders such as publishers, authors, reviewers, and organizers. Institutions, research groups, and researchers find themselves in a competitive scholarly communication system. In recent years, scholarly communication has faced rapid changes leading to the production of a large volume of scholarly artifacts that have become easily accessible Priem (2013). Publishing via scientific events such as conferences and workshops is one of the main channels for disseminating research results for certain scholarly communities. Scientific events are also considered as the main target for researchers who want to connect with other community members and stay informed about their topics of interest. In today’s scholarly communication, the career of scholars generally depends on the extent to which their success is recognized by the community.

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