Related papers: Long-Term Productivity Based on Science, not Prefe…

The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…

In recent years there has been an increasingly pressing need for the evaluation of results from public sector research activity, particularly to permit the efficient allocation of ever scarcer resources. Many of the studies and evaluation…

Measurement is a complicated but very necessary task. Many indices have been created in an effort to define the quality of knowledge produced but they have attracted strong criticism, having become synonymous with individualism, competition…

Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…

Over the last few decades, the nature of scientific research has changed in response to external influences. Firstly, powerful networked computers have become a standard tool. Secondly, society presses ever harder for research to deliver…

The scientific process is a means to turn the results of experiments into knowledge about the world in which we live. Much research effort has been directed toward automating this process. To do this, one needs to formulate the scientific…

Citations are the cornerstone of knowledge propagation and the primary means of assessing the quality of research, as well as directing investments in science. Science is increasingly becoming "data-intensive", where large volumes of data…

Students enrolled in software engineering degrees are generally required to undertake a research project in their final year through which they demonstrate the ability to conduct research, communicate outcomes, and build in-depth expertise…

Decision-making is a cognitively intensive task that requires synthesizing relevant information from multiple unstructured sources, weighing competing factors, and incorporating subjective user preferences. Existing methods, including large…

As any scientific discipline, the software engineering (SE) research community strives to contribute to the betterment of the target population of our research: software producers and consumers. We will only achieve this betterment if we…

AI policy should advance AI innovation by ensuring that its potential benefits are responsibly realized and widely shared. To achieve this, AI policymaking should place a premium on evidence: Scientific understanding and systematic analysis…

The primary theory of software engineering is that an organization's Policies and Processes influence the quality of its Products. We call this the PPP Theory. Although empirical software engineering research has grown common, it is unclear…

Productivity is the quintessential indicator of efficiency in any production system. It seems it has become a norm in bibliometrics to define research productivity as the number of publications per researcher, distinguishing it from impact.…

We develop a qualitative model of decision making with two aims: to describe how people make simple decisions and to enable computer programs to do the same. Current approaches based on Planning or Decisions Theory either ignore uncertainty…

Peer review is the primary means of quality control in academia; as an outcome of a peer review process, program and area chairs make acceptance decisions for each paper based on the review reports and scores they received. Quality of…

Workers spend a significant amount of time learning how to make good decisions. Evaluating the efficacy of a given decision, however, can be complicated -- e.g., decision outcomes are often long-term and relate to the original decision in…

One of the essential requisites of any software industry is the development of customer satisfied products. However, accomplishing the aforesaid business objective depends upon the depth of quality of product that is engineered in the…

Scientific software often presents very particular requirements regarding usability, which is often completely overlooked in this setting. As computational science has emerged as its own discipline, distinct from theoretical and…

Online experiments are the gold standard for evaluating impact on user experience and accelerating innovation in software. However, since experiments are typically limited in duration, observed treatment effects are not always permanently…

In this work we propose a metric to assess academic productivity based on publication outputs. We are interested in knowing how well a research group in an area of knowledge is doing relatively to a pre-selected set of reference groups,…