A Preliminary Analysis of the Scienti c Production of Latin American Computer Science Research Groups

Abstract

In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of the scienti c production of Latin American Computer Science research groups. Our analysis is based on data over a period of 20 years collected from DBLP, and addresses 24 groups from academic institutions in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Our results show a clear improvement in the publication output of these groups in the last 10 years, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Mexico.

Keywords

• Latin America
• Computer Science
• Scienti c Production
• Coauthorship Analysis
• Bibliometrics

Introduction

with the largest number of CS research groups. According to a recent report from CAPES3, Brazil0s Ministry of Education agency in charge of graduate programs, there are in the country 69 Computer Science graduate programs spread through 56 academic institutions. This number of programs would make the comparison with groups from other Latin American countries unbalanced. Second, to the best of our knowledge, this is the rst work that focuses on a comparisson involving CS research groups only from Latin American, whereas the literature includes some other studies that compare CS research groups from Brazil with those of other countries [ 2,3,4 ].

Related Work. Although there are some previous works in the literature that analyze and compare the research production of several countries, here we focus on three speci c ones that involve Computer Science research groups in Latin America. Laender et. al. [ 2 ] analyzed the quality of the top Computer Science graduate programs in Brazil and found that they are comparable to programs in North America and Europe w.r.t. publication and graduation rates. In particular, the study showed that the ratio between conference and journal papers in Brazilian programs, around 2.5, was close to the ratio presented by European and North American programs, which ranges from 2.3 to 2.8. Wainer et al. [ 4 ] presented a comparative study of the Brazilian CS scienti c production with some Latin American (Argentina, Chile, Mexico), European, BRIC (Russia, India, China), and other relevant countries such as South Korea, Australia, and USA from 2001 to 2005. The ndings show that Brazil's scienti c production is the largest in Latin America, getting close to that of European countries such as Spain and Italy, and almost the same as India and Russia. Menezes et al. [ 3 ] analyzed the characteristics of three coauthorship networks in CS communities formed, respectively, by researchers from Brazil, North America (Canada and USA) and Europe (France, Switzerland and UK). They provided several statistics of the three networks and performed a temporal analysis of them over a span of 12 years, from 1994 to 2006. In this paper we not only focus on the overall production of the eight Latin American countries considered, but also analyze the performance of the research groups of the main institutions in each country. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the data gathered for our analysis, Section 3 discusses our preliminary results, and Section 4 presents some conclusions and insights for future work. 2

Data Gathered

In this paper we base our analysis on publications from the last 20 years that were authored by researchers from institutions in Latin America that o er graduate programs in Computer Science, Informatics and System Engineering [ 1 ]. In particular, we consider the following institutions: 3 http://avaliacaotrienal2013.capes.gov.br/relatorios-de-avaliacao { Argentina: Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Universidad Nacional de la Plata (UNLP), Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNICEN) and Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS). { Chile: Ponti cia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC-Chile), Universidad de Chile (UCHILE) and Universidad de Concepcion (UDEC). { Colombia: Universidad ICESI (ICESI), Ponti cia Universidad Javeriana Cali (PUJ-Cali), Universidad de los Andes (ANDES), Universidad del Valle (UNIVALLE) and Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL). { Cuba: Universidad de La Habana (UH), Universidad de las Ciencias Informaticas (UCI) and Universidad de Oriente (UO). { Mexico: Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politecnico Nacional (CINVESTAV), Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico (UAEMEX) and Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). { Peru: Universidad Catolica San Pablo (USCP). { Uruguay: Universidad de la Republica (UDELAR). { Venezuela: Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), Universidad de Carabobo (UC) and Universidad Simon Bol var (USB).

The data gathering process consisted of three major steps. In the rst step, we identi ed the researchers, i.e., faculty, from each institution of interest. In the second step, we collected data from the DBLP entry of each identi ed researcher. Finally, we parsed the resulting XML les and populated a relational database with 6126 publications (conference papers and journal articles) spread over 1643 publication venues. The data analyzed in this paper re ects the DBLP repository on March 27, 2014. 3

Results

In this section we present some results of our analysis. Table 1 summarizes the publication statistics of each research group by country from 1994 to 2013. The publication rate of each institution i is given by Equation 1 i =

P2013 Piy y=1994 Riy

20 Xc =

P i2Uc i j Uc j where Piy is the total number of publications from institution i in year y, and Riy is the total number of researchers a liated to institution i in year y. The overall mean Xc of the scienti c production per country was calculated according to Equation 2 where Uc is the set of institutions from country c.

As we can see from Table 1, the overall mean of the scienti c production per country is 2.59 for Argentina, 3.18 for Chile, 1.02 for Colombia, 0.92 for Cuba, (1) (2) 2.28 for Mexico, 0.87 for Peru, 1.41 for Uruguay and 1.58 for Venezuela. These numbers show a clear predominance of the research groups in Argentina, Chile and Mexico, with an average of more than two publications per year over the 20year time period. Moreover, these groups contribute with, respectively, 28.80%, 28.72% and 25.30% of the overall production of the 24 institutions considered. They are also the groups associated with graduate programs that are more than 10 years old and have a more consolidated structure with the majority of the faculty members holding a PhD degree. A second group of countries comprises Colombia, Venezuela and Uruguay with an average publication rate by year between 1.0 and 1.58. Finally, we have Cuba with an average of 0.92 publication by year and Peru, with a young graduate program at the Universidad Catolica de San Pablo, showing an average of 0.87 publication by year.

Country

Institution # of Pub. Pub. Rate i Overall Mean Xc

Argentina

Chile

Colombia

Cuba

Mexico

Peru

Uruguay

Venezuela

UBA UNLP UNICEN UNS PUC-Chile UCHILE UDEC ICESI PUJ-Cali ANDES UNIVALLE UNAL UH UCI UO CINVESTAV ITESM UAMEX UNAM UCSP UDELAR UCV UC USB 888 492 385 336 408 1530 155 36 38 73 29 204 38 27 127 655 179 31 979 35 286 221 44 285 2.21 2.76 2.84 2.55 2.51 5.49 1.53 0.75 1.36 1.10 0.66 1.23 0.72 0.69 1.35 3.79 1.66 0.94 2.73 0.87 1.41 1.56 0.97 2.21 2.59 3.18 1.02 0.92 2.28 0.87 1.41 1.58

We also observed that the average number of coauthors during the period between 1994 and 2013 is 2.26 for journal articles and 2.41 for conference papers, which shows that Latin American CS groups follow a coathorship pattern similar to North American and European ones [ 2 ]. It is also worth mentioning that the Latin American groups publish more in conferences than in journals following again a similar pattern of many groups in North America, Europe and Brazil [ 2 ]. We can also analyze in more detail the temporal evolution of the region scienti c s n o i t a c i l b u P

AR

CL

CO

CU

M X

P E

U Y

V E production in Figure 1, which shows the average number of publications per country over time. Notice that there has been an increase w.r.t. publications in all countries, in particular Chile, which presented the largest increase, followed by Argentina and Mexico, where we observe a consistent increase from 1998 to 2008 (probably as a consequence of the Internet access and availability of scienti c works on the Web). Finally, we present an analysis of the research networks originated from the coauthorships (see Figure 2) and discuss how they evolved over time. Here, we de ne a research network as a group of authors who have published together at least ve papers in a decade. We determined research networks by mining maximal sets of authors, that is, the largest set of authors whose subsets are also signi cant in terms of number of publications [ 5 ]. Table 2 shows both the number of groups and their average size per country and decade. We can see that all countries presented an increase w.r.t both indicators. The increase in the number of groups demonstrate that there is an increasing research density 4 http://tortuga.lbd.dcc.ufmg.br/LACompNet in the region, while the increase in the average size of the groups shows that researchers are cooperating more and there is a growing critical mass in the CS area. In this paper, we assessed the CS scienti c production in Latin American, identifying research groups in each country. A temporal study was also performed, using a period of 20 years, from 1994 to 2013. We have compared the production among some research groups from eight countries in Latin American, and found a fast increase in publications from some of them, possibly due to cooperation work with groups of North America and Europe, spoted when analizing the research groups. We also found other groups that were structured through o ering of Master (MSc) and Doctorate (PhD) programs. As future work we would like to explore how these groups are formed through their coauthorship networks. In addition, we plan to use other sources of bibliographic information for exploring coauthorship networks in more detail.

Acknowledgments. This work is partially funded by CAPES, CNPq, FAPEMIG and InWeb, Brazil.

References

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2. Laender , A.H.F. , Lucena , C.J.P. , Maldonado , J.C. , Souza e Silva, E. , Ziviani , N. Assessing the research and education quality of the top Brazilian Computer Science graduate programs . ACM SIGCSE Bulletin , 40 ( 2 ): 135 - 145 , 2008 .

3. Menezes , G.V. , Ziviani , N. , Laender , A.H.F. , Almeida , V.F.A. A Geographical Analysis of Knowledge Production in Computer Science . Proc. of WWW , pp. 1041 - 1050 , 2009 .

4. Wainer , J. , Xavier , E.C. , Bezerra , F. Scienti c production in computer science: A comparative study of Brazil and other countries . Scientom., 81 ( 2 ): 535 - 547 , 2009 .

5. Zaki , M. , Meira Jr ., W. Data Mining and Analysis: Fundamental Concepts and Algorithms , Cambridge, 2014 .