2015.06.28
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2014
The Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge
has published the 2014
Journal Citation Reports.
Following similar studies I performed in the past eight years
(2007,
'08,
'09,
'10,
'11,
'12,
'13,
'14)
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
of computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2014"Last modified: Sunday, June 28, 2015 11:49 am
2015.02.28
ABS's 2015 Academic Journal Guide
The UK-based
Association of Business Schools
recently published the
2015 Academic Journal Guide (AJG)
as an update to its 2010 version,
sparking
controversy in its press coverage.
Following a
study
I've been performing
on the
impact factor
of computer science journals
for the past eight years based on the yearly
Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge
updates of its
Journal Citation Reports,
I decided to look at what has changed in the AJG from 2010 to 2015.
Continue reading "ABS's 2015 Academic Journal Guide"Last modified: Saturday, February 28, 2015 9:00 pm
2014.08.08
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2013
The Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge
has published the 2013
Journal Citation Reports.
Following similar studies I performed in the past sever years
(2007,
'08,
'09,
'10,
'11,
'12,
'13)
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
of computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2013"Last modified: Saturday, August 9, 2014 5:00 pm
2013.07.03
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2012
The Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge
has published the 2012
Journal Citation Reports.
Following similar studies I performed in the past six years
(2007,
'08,
'09,
'10,
'11,
'12)
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
of computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2012"Last modified: Wednesday, July 3, 2013 10:36 am
2012.12.12
Changes in the Way we View Computing
The Association for Computing Machinery
recently released the
2012 version of the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS).
This is the work of 120 volunteers and marks significant changes over
the previous version, which was released in 1998.
To create it the volunteers mined ACM Digital Library search terms and used
the services of a specialist company that creates ontologies.
To see what has changed in the past 14 years in the way we view computing,
I used
Wordle to create word clouds from the 1998 and the 2012 versions.
Here are the two views of our discipline's Zeitgeist
and my take of their differences.
Continue reading "Changes in the Way we View Computing"Last modified: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 9:26 pm
2012.07.03
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2011
The Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge
has published the 2011
Journal Citation Reports.
Following
similar studies I performed in
2007,
'08,
'09,
'10,
and
'11,
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
of computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2011"Last modified: Tuesday, July 3, 2012 3:43 pm
2012.03.22
How do Big US Firms Use Open Source Software?
We hear a lot about the adoption of open source software,
but when I was asked to provide hard evidence there was
little I could find.
In an
article I recently published in the
Journal of Systems and Software together with my colleague
Vaggelis Giannikas we tried to fill this gap by
examining the type of software the US Fortune 1000 companies use
in their web-facing operations.
The results were not what I was expecting.
Continue reading "How do Big US Firms Use Open Source Software?"Last modified: Thursday, March 22, 2012 8:47 pm
2011.07.31
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2010
The Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge
has published the 2010
Journal Citation Reports.
Following
similar studies I performed in
2007,
2008,
2009,
and
2010,
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
of computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2010"Last modified: Sunday, July 31, 2011 8:15 pm
2010.06.19
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2009
The ISI Web of Knowledge
recently published the 2009
Journal Citation Reports.
Following
similar studies I performed in
2007,
2008,
and
2009,
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
in computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2009"Last modified: Sunday, June 20, 2010 0:13 am
2009.10.15
Tags for Bibliography References
I love writing my papers in LaTeX.
Its declarative style allows me to concentrate on the content,
rather than the form.
I even format the text according to the content,
keeping each phrase or logical unit on a separate line.
Many publishers supply style files that format the article according
to the journal's specifications.
Even better, over the years I've created
an extensive collection
of bibliographies.
I can therefore use BibTeX to cite works with a simple command,
without having to re-enter their details.
This also allows me to use style files
to format references according to the publisher's specification.
Yet, there is still the problem of navigating from a citation to
the work's details.
Here is how I solve it.
Continue reading "Tags for Bibliography References"Last modified: Thursday, October 15, 2009 9:25 am
2009.06.24
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2008
The ISI Web of Knowledge
recently published the 2008
Journal Citation Reports.
Following
similar studies I performed in
2007
and
2008,
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
in computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2008"Last modified: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 11:20 am
2009.04.30
Best Day to Blog
Most of us don't have enough time to blog every day.
Given that blogging ideas can often be pending for days,
which is the best day to publish them?
Continue reading "Best Day to Blog"Last modified: Thursday, April 30, 2009 7:33 pm
2009.03.10
YouTube vs. TOSEM
Over the past couple of weeks colleagues and friends I encounter
in the hallways or at various meetings have been commenting about a small
video I posted on YouTube.
This video, titled
Information Train,
describes a demonstration experiment I performed at an event whose aim
was to familiarize children with science.
Often this video is the first discussion I've ever had with a colleague
regarding my work.
This struck me as odd, because I consider other parts of my research
a lot more significant that this experiment.
However, a look at the number of downloads of an
article
we recently published in the (highly regarded)
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
and the views of the YouTube video proved instructive.
Continue reading "YouTube vs. TOSEM"Last modified: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 11:35 am
2009.02.04
Beautiful Architecture
What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture?
Over the past couple of years, my colleague
Georgios Gousios
and I worked
on answering this question through a collection of intriguing essays
from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects.
Continue reading "Beautiful Architecture"Last modified: Wednesday, February 4, 2009 1:48 pm
2009.01.22
Paper-Based Publishing Meets the Web
A few hours ago somebody posted
a link
to Brian Kernighan's
IEEE Software
column titled
Sometimes the Old Ways Are Best
at reddit.com.
At the time of writing,
the entry
has already attracted 143 comments and 172 votes.
It contains is an (often interesting) discussion between Young Turks praising
IDEs/SlickEdit/BeyondCompare and defenders of Unix tools.
One bemused respondent commented (in a somewhat irreverent style)
on the strange fact that a column that hit the
headlines in January was mentioning summer projects.
Here is the story behind the column's timeline and some thoughts
on paper-based publishing.
Continue reading "Paper-Based Publishing Meets the Web"Last modified: Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:51 pm
2008.06.27
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2007
The ISI Web of Knowledge
recently published the 2007
Journal Citation Reports.
Following
a similar study I performed last year,
here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
in computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2007"Last modified: Friday, June 27, 2008 11:22 pm
2008.05.30
Denise Rousseau on Publishing to Top Tier Journals
Yesterday I heard a talk by
Denise M. Rousseau,
President of the Academy of Management and the 1998-2007 Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
During the talk (which turned out to be an interesting Q&A discussion)
I wrote down some of the tips she gave.
Here they are.
Continue reading "Denise Rousseau on Publishing to Top Tier Journals"Last modified: Friday, May 30, 2008 10:25 am
2008.05.24
Interoperability, at Last
Language is a very powerful way to describe behavior.
Therefore even when I create pictures, instead of dragging around my mouse,
I use declarative tools like GraphViz,
gnuplot,
and
UMLGraph.
These allow me to describe what I want to draw, instead of
how I want the end-result to look like.
The truth however is that the end-results are not always perfect.
Today I realized that the state of the art has advanced to the point
where I can create the drawing declaratively, and then visually
polish the final drawing.
Continue reading "Interoperability, at Last"Last modified: Saturday, May 24, 2008 9:48 pm
2008.04.28
In Presentations Less is More
A couple of months ago I prepared the slides for a paper I will present
at the
30th International Conference on Software Engineering.
After reading Garr Reynolds's book
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design on Presentation Design and Delivery
I became enlightened, and I decided to redo the presentation from scratch,
creating less cluttered, more focused, and simpler slides.
Continue reading "In Presentations Less is More"Last modified: Monday, April 28, 2008 0:12 am
2007.11.22
Cover Letters for Publications in LaTeX
I admit it.
Although I compose most of my journal publications in LaTeX,
I use Microsoft Word for writing the cover letters.
The university's letterhead is provided in Word, and setting
up and compiling a LaTeX document for a single text
page is not worth the trouble.
Continue reading "Cover Letters for Publications in LaTeX"Last modified: Thursday, November 22, 2007 12:30 am
2007.11.10
On Paper
A box of crayons and a big sheet of paper provides a more expressive medium for kids than computerized paint programs.
— Clifford Stoll
This column came to life as I was trying to devise an algorithm for
analyzing initializers for C arrays and structures. At the time I was
using the CScout
refactoring browser to look for possible differences
between closed and open source code. I had already processed the
Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows research kernel source codel and only the
OpenSolaris kernel remained. Unlikethe other three code bases, Sun’s
code didn’t appear to use any exotic compiler extensions, so
CScout uncomplainingly devoured one file after the next. Then, after
aspproximately six hours of processing and 80 percent along the way,
it reported a syntax error.
Continue reading "On Paper"Last modified: Saturday, November 10, 2007 11:10 pm
2007.10.11
Creative Commons Around the World
On Saturday
Lawrence Lessig
will be inaugurating the launch of
Creative Commons
licenses in Greece.
This prompted me to investigate how pages licensed under creative commons
licenses are distributed on the internet.
Continue reading "Creative Commons Around the World"Last modified: Thursday, October 11, 2007 2:56 pm
2007.07.10
Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2006
The ISI Web of Knowledge
recently published the 2006
Journal Citation Reports.
Here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the
impact factor
in computer science journals.
Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2006"Last modified: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 3:31 pm
2007.05.23
Decyphering Modern Texts
One would think that the decyphering of old writings would be the domain
of archeologists poring over ancient
palimpsests.
It turns out that, thanks to modern technology, the quality of
documents written only a decade ago can decay to the point of
requiring decypherment.
And don't get me started on the problems of
digital preservation and the
decay of URLs.
Continue reading "Decyphering Modern Texts"Last modified: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 6:34 pm
2007.03.23
Software Development Productivity Award
Yesterday, at the
17th annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards
my book
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective won a Software Development Productivity Award
in the Technical Books category.
Continue reading "Software Development Productivity Award"Last modified: Friday, March 23, 2007 12:13 am
2007.02.27
A Peek at Beautiful Code
An exciting new book is about to hit the shelves,
and I consider myself very lucky to be among its contributors.
Beautiful Code,
subtitled "leading programmers explain how they think",
contains 33 chapters where contributors describe some code
they consider noteworthy.
Although I don't consider myself worthy of the book's subtitle,
I love coding, and
I'm extremely happy that code is taking the leading role among such an
illustrious cast.
Here is the complete table of the book's contents.
Continue reading "A Peek at Beautiful Code"Last modified: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 8:45 pm
2007.02.04
How to Embed Citations in Diagrams
Diagrams in scientific publications occasionally link to other elements
of the publication, such as bibliographic or section references.
Maintaining consistency between the citations in the diagram
and the publication can be tricky, but a small Perl script
can automate this process.
Continue reading "How to Embed Citations in Diagrams"Last modified: Sunday, February 4, 2007 9:32 pm
2007.01.15
Landscape vs Portrait Monitors
Laptop monitors keep getting wider and wider.
What I would really like would be for them to get higher.
Continue reading "Landscape vs Portrait Monitors"Last modified: Monday, January 15, 2007 5:47 pm
2006.11.08
Converting RIS to BibTeX
Digital libraries increasingly provide an option to export bibliographic
data.
Unfortunately, many, like
IEEE Xplore,
SpringerLink, and
Scopus
don't support the BibTeX format I use for storing
my bibliographies.
(To its credit the
ACM Portal offers a BibTeX
export option.
On the other hand, Elsevier's
ScienceDirect and
JSTOR don't offer
any export facility.)
Continue reading "Converting RIS to BibTeX"Last modified: Wednesday, November 8, 2006 11:01 am
2006.10.24
A Solution for Web Citations
In 2003 I published a
study
providing evidence that the half life of a web citation was four years.
WebCite offers a neat
solution to this problem.
Continue reading "A Solution for Web Citations"Last modified: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 2:35 pm
2006.10.11
Web Page Hits, Amazon.com's Sales Rank, and Actual Sales
Over the past three years I've been collecting the
amazon.com Sales Rank for my book
Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective,
and (lately) also for its sequel
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective.
Yesterday I mapped the sales rank to actual sales, and correlated those
with significant events and hits on the book's web page.
Continue reading "Web Page Hits, Amazon.com's Sales Rank, and Actual Sales"Last modified: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 10:20 am
2006.07.02
Quality, Democracy, and Code
Edwin Fine recently posted on amazon.com a review of my
book
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective.
In the review he complained about the quality of proofreading and copy editing.
(The errors he noted are now listed in the book's errata.)
His comments sparked off a delightful discussion on the reasons behind
the falling quality levels of various products, the philosophical importance of this phenomenon,
and its effect on coding standards.
Continue reading "Quality, Democracy, and Code"Last modified: Monday, July 3, 2006 0:28 am
2006.04.12
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective
My new book
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective
got published,
three years after I started writing it.
The book owes more to open source software than any of the books
dealing with Linux, PHP, Apache, Perl or any other book covering
a specific technology.
Continue reading "Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective"Last modified: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:05 am
2006.03.16
Active Voice v Passive Voice
The most common change copy-editors perform on my prose is the conversion
of passive voice constructs into active voice.
By now I've become accustomed to it, and I now try to use active voice
whenever possible.
It turns out that the proverbial coin has in this case two faces.
Continue reading "Active Voice v Passive Voice"Last modified: Thursday, May 4, 2006 12:17 am
2005.12.19
Who Will Edit the Editors?
I am often asked to review papers that are written in a language
only superficially resembling English.
In a few cases the writing is so confused that I return the
manuscript, asking for it to be edited by a native speaker of English.
I realize that writing proper English is an additional
hurdle for, possibly brilliant, scientists who are not
native speakers of English, and
I often wondered how authors could address this problem.
Apparently, there are companies that will edit scientific papers
for a modest fee.
Continue reading "Who Will Edit the Editors?"Last modified: Monday, December 19, 2005 2:53 pm
2005.06.09
An Open Letter to a Copy-Editor
Copy-editors perform a valuable service.
They take prose that is often rough and unfinished, and
massage it into a professional document.
Unfortunately, sometimes copy editing can go to far
and distort the meaning, especially in technical writing.
Also, my feeling is that across the across-the-board copy editing
performed by many publications results in writing whose language
is uniformly polished, and, yes, bland.
Think of what would happen if the writings of Hemmingway got
copy edited.
While I consider my writing at least five leagues below that level,
I prefer to learn my own way toward perfection, than to battle
with corrections that sometimes change the meaning of what
I write in treacherous ways.
Continue reading "An Open Letter to a Copy-Editor"Last modified: Thursday, August 25, 2005 12:46 am
2005.05.11
Ordnung muss sein
A free-form translation of the above German phrase (orderliness must exist)
would be that orderliness is not negotiable.
In the domain of information technology I find this motto particularly
pertinent.
Continue reading "Ordnung muss sein"Last modified: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 4:25 pm
2004.11.19
Poster Presentations
I've found myself twice in a period of six months giving a poster
presentation at a conference.
This has been a new experience for me, and, by looking at what others
were doing, I realized I could do a lot better.
Continue reading "Poster Presentations"Last modified: Friday, November 19, 2004 1:00 am
2004.10.27
Accuracy and Precision in Scientific Publications
The interesting article by Paper, Rodger and Simon,
Voice Says it All in the Navy,
(Communications of the ACM
47(8):97-101, August 2004), is tarred by an unfortunate
and, sadly, increasingly common error. In the article's tables and
explanatory text the authors report their results with an unwarranted
precision of three significant digits: 71.4, 42.9, 57.1, and so on.
Continue reading "Accuracy and Precision in Scientific Publications"Last modified: Thursday, October 28, 2004 7:47 pm
2003.05.20
Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
In July 2000, while working on a paper on the use of slicing for
choosing parts of an application to develop in a scripting language
(don't ask), I found myself searching open-source programs for
motivating examples, and experimenting with a tool for annotating the
corresponding source code. At some point, a loud click sound in my mind
brought to my attention the fact that although most books and courses
teach us how to program, we actually spend most of our time reading code
others have written. I reasoned that by applying my annotation tool on
open source software I could write a book to present the ideas,
techniques, and tools that go behind code reading.
Continue reading "Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective"Last modified: Friday, October 3, 2003 6:12 pm