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What publications metadata tell us about the evolution of a scientific community: the case of the Brazilian human–computer interaction conference series

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Abstract

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is a research field which engages different disciplines, interest groups and communities, and which has emerged in different countries at different times. To understand how the HCI research community has evolved in Brazil, this paper applies data and visual analytics to its main conference series, the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, henceforth IHC. We have explored the metadata of all 340 full papers published in the 14 editions of IHC. Our goal was to investigate the evolution of the Brazilian HCI community so we can raise the level of “self-knowledge” and thus discuss strategies that can further help develop this research community. From our analysis, we could understand more deeply the authorship profile of our community and how it has changed over time, the co-authorship networks evolution, the prominent institutions and states, the reference profile and the research topics over time. We hope that this paper will contribute to inspire other scientific communities to analyze themselves, and encourage their own discussions.

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Notes

  1. Credit (Arruda et al. 2009): one paper equals one credit. Each author receives an equal share of the credit. For example, for a paper written by four authors, each author receives 0.25 credits.

  2. ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

  3. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

  4. ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

  5. International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces.

  6. IEEE Information Visualization.

  7. In Brazil, all researchers should have their curriculum vitae registered in an online governmental platform, named Lattes (http://lattes.cnpq.br/), in order to work at universities, get scholarships, research grants, and funded projects.

  8. We had similar difficulties as those reported by Kaye (Kaye 2009) to identify gender information. We decided to identify authors by their presumed biological sex, taking into consideration not only their names, but also additional information found online (in their official Lattes CV and in social networks).

  9. The areas of Collaborative Systems and Computers and Education in Brazil have gender profiles similar to IHC.

  10. Kaye’s paper presents CHI data from 1983 to 2008, and NordiCHI data from 2002 to 2008. He presented only line charts with the percentages of each gender per year, without the precise numbers. Our analysis therefore considers an estimate obtained from his charts.

  11. Normalizing according to both the number of institutions per author and to the number of authors of each paper, we have that: each author has weight w.author = 1/num.paper.authors; and each institution has weight w.institution = w.author/num.author.institutions.

  12. http://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE449.

  13. In this analysis, we only considered citations to full IHC papers. The networks would look very different if taking into account papers published elsewhere as well.

  14. To promote the reproducibility of the results, we are documenting the R scripts developed to make them available as open source. At this moment, they are available to the scientific community upon request to the authors.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the undergraduate students who kindly helped to populate the database with the papers’ metadata. Simone Barbosa also thanks CNPq for the financial support to this work through Grants #309828/2015-5 and #453996/2014-0.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio, Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 225, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 22451-900, Brazil

    Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa

  2. Faculdade de Informática, PUCRS, Av. Ipiranga, 668 prédio 32, Petrópolis, Porto Alegre, RS, 90619-900, Brazil

    Milene Selbach Silveira

  3. Departamento de Ciência da Computação, UDESC, Centro de Ciências Tecnológicas – CCT, Rua Paulo Malschitzki, 200, Campus Universitário Prof. Avelino Marcante, Zona Industrial Norte, Joinville, SC, 89219-710, Brazil

    Isabela Gasparini

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  1. Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa
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  2. Milene Selbach Silveira
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  3. Isabela Gasparini
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Correspondence to Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa.

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Barbosa, S.D.J., Silveira, M.S. & Gasparini, I. What publications metadata tell us about the evolution of a scientific community: the case of the Brazilian human–computer interaction conference series. Scientometrics 110, 275–300 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2162-4

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