Understanding the Contributions of Junior Researchers at Software-Engineering Conferences

Junior researchers play a key role in advancing research by providing diverse and novel points of view. However their participation in the scientific community and especially computer science is not well-understood. In this paper we describe our first steps towards understanding the contribution (i.e in terms of publications) of junior researchers to computer science. More precisely we investigated to what extent junior researchers contribute publications to four highly reputable software-engineering conferences. We collected data on 5 188 main-track research papers and the corresponding 8 730 authors. The incipient results indicate a decline in the proportion of junior researchers contributing to the main-tracks of these conferences. Moreover their ratio of contribution is highly related to collaborations with more experienced researchers. With this pilot study we aim to show that the analysis method we employed can foster a more detailed understanding of the status and development of junior researchers' contributions.