A bibliometric assessment of software engineering themes, scholars and institutions (2013–2020)

Abstract This paper is the updated version (2013–2020) of the series of papers on emerging themes, top scholars and institutes on software engineering (SE), published by the Journal of Systems and Software for almost 25 years. The paper reports the findings of a bibliometric study by applying the systematic mapping technique on top-quality software engineering venues (handling a dataset of 11.668 studies). The design of the study remains the same for the complete decade, so that the results are consistent and comparable: As the ranking metric for institutions, we used the count of papers in which authors affiliated with the corresponding institute have been identified in the obtained dataset. Regarding scholars we computed the corresponding rankings based on the number of published papers and the average number of citations. In this version, the analysis of emerging trends and themes has been promoted compared to the previous years to provide more insights on what a newcomer in the software engineering domain should look at, as well as to recap the state-of-research in terms of themes to more experienced SE researchers.