SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AS SEEN THROUGH ITS RESEARCH LITERATURE - A STUDY IN CO-WORD ANALYSIS

This empirical research demonstrates the effectiveness of content anal ysis to map the research literature of the software engineering discip line. The results suggest that certain research themes in software eng ineering have remained constant, but with changing thrusts. Other them es have arisen, matured, and then faded as major research topics, whil e still others seem transient or immature. Go-word analysis is the spe cific technique used. This methodology identifies associations among p ublication descriptors (indexing terms) from the ACM Computing Classif ication System and produces networks of descriptors that reveal these underlying patterns. This methodology is applicable to other domains w ith a supporting corpus of textual data. While this study utilizes ind ex terms from a fixed taxonomy, that restriction is not inherent; the descriptors can be generated from the corpus. Hence, co-word analysis and the supporting software tools employed here can provide unique ins ights into any discipline's evolution.