Exploring over a decade of systems engineering research center: A community detection and text analytics approach

The Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) is a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) of the US Department of Defense (DoD) formed in 2008 with more than 20 collaborator universities in the United States. Over the last decade, SERC has conducted research with Principal Investigators from universities within the SERC network, as reflected in technical reports (TR). These reports describe detailed information and analysis of the conducted research for every project under SERC support, such as written records of experiments or results of a scientific project. We analyzed the TRs from 2009 to early 2023 to identify research streams, topics, and evolution in systems engineering (SE) research using text mining and network analysis techniques, such as Louvain Community Detection and word similarity. As a result, we identified four major research streams over a decade of research projects, along with insights about topics and the evolution of SE within this time frame. Finally, we distinguished most profile authors and their most significant collaborations and networks.