How Many Researchers Does it Take to Make Impact? Mining Software Engineering Publication Data for Collaboration Insights

Abstract

In the three and half decades since the inception of organized research publication in software engineering, the discipline has gained a significant maturity. This journey to maturity has been guided by the synergy of ideas, individuals and interactions. In this journey software engineering has evolved into an increasingly empirical discipline. Empirical sciences involve significant collaboration, leading to large teams working on research problems. In this paper we analyze a corpus of 19,000+ papers, written by 21,000+ authors from 16 publication venues between 1975 to 2010, to understand what is the ideal team size that has produced maximum impact in software engineering research, and whether researchers in software engineering have maintained the same co-authorship relations over long periods of time as a means of achieving research impact.