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Hiring CS Graduates: What We Learned from Employers

Computer science ( CS ) majors are in high demand and account for a large part of national computer and information technology job market applicants. Employment in this sector is projected to grow 12% between 2018 and 2028, which is faster than the average of all other occupations. Published data are available on traditional non-computer science-specific hiring processes. However, the hiring process for CS majors may be different. It is critical to have up-to-date information on questions such as “what positions are in high demand for CS majors?,” “what is a typical hiring process?,” and “what do employers say they look for when hiring CS graduates?” This article discusses the analysis of a survey of 218 recruiters hiring CS graduates in the United States. We used Atlas.ti to analyze qualitative survey data and report the results on what positions are in the highest demand, the hiring process, and the resume review process. Our study revealed that a software developer was the most common job the recruiters were looking to fill. We found that the hiring process steps for CS graduates are generally aligned with traditional hiring steps, with an additional emphasis on technical and coding tests. Recruiters reported that their hiring choices were based on reviewing resume’s experience, GPA, and projects sections. The results provide insights into the hiring process, decision making, resume analysis, and some discrepancies between current undergraduate CS program outcomes and employers’ expectations.

A Systematic Literature Review of Empiricism and Norms of Reporting in Computing Education Research Literature

Context. Computing Education Research (CER) is critical to help the computing education community and policy makers support the increasing population of students who need to learn computing skills for future careers. For a community to systematically advance knowledge about a topic, the members must be able to understand published work thoroughly enough to perform replications, conduct meta-analyses, and build theories. There is a need to understand whether published research allows the CER community to systematically advance knowledge and build theories. Objectives. The goal of this study is to characterize the reporting of empiricism in Computing Education Research literature by identifying whether publications include content necessary for researchers to perform replications, meta-analyses, and theory building. We answer three research questions related to this goal: (RQ1) What percentage of papers in CER venues have some form of empirical evaluation? (RQ2) Of the papers that have empirical evaluation, what are the characteristics of the empirical evaluation? (RQ3) Of the papers that have empirical evaluation, do they follow norms (both for inclusion and for labeling of information needed for replication, meta-analysis, and, eventually, theory-building) for reporting empirical work? Methods. We conducted a systematic literature review of the 2014 and 2015 proceedings or issues of five CER venues: Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS), International Symposium on Computing Education Research (ICER), Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), and Computer Science Education (CSE). We developed and applied the CER Empiricism Assessment Rubric to the 427 papers accepted and published at these venues over 2014 and 2015. Two people evaluated each paper using the Base Rubric for characterizing the paper. An individual person applied the other rubrics to characterize the norms of reporting, as appropriate for the paper type. Any discrepancies or questions were discussed between multiple reviewers to resolve. Results. We found that over 80% of papers accepted across all five venues had some form of empirical evaluation. Quantitative evaluation methods were the most frequently reported. Papers most frequently reported results on interventions around pedagogical techniques, curriculum, community, or tools. There was a split in papers that had some type of comparison between an intervention and some other dataset or baseline. Most papers reported related work, following the expectations for doing so in the SIGCSE and CER community. However, many papers were lacking properly reported research objectives, goals, research questions, or hypotheses; description of participants; study design; data collection; and threats to validity. These results align with prior surveys of the CER literature. Conclusions. CER authors are contributing empirical results to the literature; however, not all norms for reporting are met. We encourage authors to provide clear, labeled details about their work so readers can use the study methodologies and results for replications and meta-analyses. As our community grows, our reporting of CER should mature to help establish computing education theory to support the next generation of computing learners.

Light Diacritic Restoration to Disambiguate Homographs in Modern Arabic Texts

Diacritic restoration (also known as diacritization or vowelization) is the process of inserting the correct diacritical markings into a text. Modern Arabic is typically written without diacritics, e.g., newspapers. This lack of diacritical markings often causes ambiguity, and though natives are adept at resolving, there are times they may fail. Diacritic restoration is a classical problem in computer science. Still, as most of the works tackle the full (heavy) diacritization of text, we, however, are interested in diacritizing the text using a fewer number of diacritics. Studies have shown that a fully diacritized text is visually displeasing and slows down the reading. This article proposes a system to diacritize homographs using the least number of diacritics, thus the name “light.” There is a large class of words that fall under the homograph category, and we will be dealing with the class of words that share the spelling but not the meaning. With fewer diacritics, we do not expect any effect on reading speed, while eye strain is reduced. The system contains morphological analyzer and context similarities. The morphological analyzer is used to generate all word candidates for diacritics. Then, through a statistical approach and context similarities, we resolve the homographs. Experimentally, the system shows very promising results, and our best accuracy is 85.6%.

A genre-based analysis of questions and comments in Q&A sessions after conference paper presentations in computer science

Gender diversity in computer science at a large public r1 research university: reporting on a self-study.

With the number of jobs in computer occupations on the rise, there is a greater need for computer science (CS) graduates than ever. At the same time, most CS departments across the country are only seeing 25–30% of women students in their classes, meaning that we are failing to draw interest from a large portion of the population. In this work, we explore the gender gap in CS at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, a large public R1 research university, using three data sets that span thousands of students across six academic years. Specifically, we combine these data sets to study the gender gaps in four core CS courses and explore the correlation of several factors with retention and the impact of these factors on changes to the gender gap as students proceed through the CS courses toward completing the CS major. For example, we find that a significant percentage of women students taking the introductory CS1 course for majors do not intend to major in CS, which may be a contributing factor to a large increase in the gender gap immediately after CS1. This finding implies that part of the retention task is attracting these women students to further explore the major. Results from our study include both novel findings and findings that are consistent with known challenges for increasing gender diversity in CS. In both cases, we provide extensive quantitative data in support of the findings.

Designing for Student-Directedness: How K–12 Teachers Utilize Peers to Support Projects

Student-directed projects—projects in which students have individual control over what they create and how to create it—are a promising practice for supporting the development of conceptual understanding and personal interest in K–12 computer science classrooms. In this article, we explore a central (and perhaps counterintuitive) design principle identified by a group of K–12 computer science teachers who support student-directed projects in their classrooms: in order for students to develop their own ideas and determine how to pursue them, students must have opportunities to engage with other students’ work. In this qualitative study, we investigated the instructional practices of 25 K–12 teachers using a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews to develop understandings of how they used peer work to support student-directed projects in their classrooms. Teachers described supporting their students in navigating three stages of project development: generating ideas, pursuing ideas, and presenting ideas. For each of these three stages, teachers considered multiple factors to encourage engagement with peer work in their classrooms, including the quality and completeness of shared work and the modes of interaction with the work. We discuss how this pedagogical approach offers students new relationships to their own learning, to their peers, and to their teachers and communicates important messages to students about their own competence and agency, potentially contributing to aims within computer science for broadening participation.

Creativity in CS1: A Literature Review

Computer science is a fast-growing field in today’s digitized age, and working in this industry often requires creativity and innovative thought. An issue within computer science education, however, is that large introductory programming courses often involve little opportunity for creative thinking within coursework. The undergraduate introductory programming course (CS1) is notorious for its poor student performance and retention rates across multiple institutions. Integrating opportunities for creative thinking may help combat this issue by adding a personal touch to course content, which could allow beginner CS students to better relate to the abstract world of programming. Research on the role of creativity in computer science education (CSE) is an interesting area with a lot of room for exploration due to the complexity of the phenomenon of creativity as well as the CSE research field being fairly new compared to some other education fields where this topic has been more closely explored. To contribute to this area of research, this article provides a literature review exploring the concept of creativity as relevant to computer science education and CS1 in particular. Based on the review of the literature, we conclude creativity is an essential component to computer science, and the type of creativity that computer science requires is in fact, a teachable skill through the use of various tools and strategies. These strategies include the integration of open-ended assignments, large collaborative projects, learning by teaching, multimedia projects, small creative computational exercises, game development projects, digitally produced art, robotics, digital story-telling, music manipulation, and project-based learning. Research on each of these strategies and their effects on student experiences within CS1 is discussed in this review. Last, six main components of creativity-enhancing activities are identified based on the studies about incorporating creativity into CS1. These components are as follows: Collaboration, Relevance, Autonomy, Ownership, Hands-On Learning, and Visual Feedback. The purpose of this article is to contribute to computer science educators’ understanding of how creativity is best understood in the context of computer science education and explore practical applications of creativity theory in CS1 classrooms. This is an important collection of information for restructuring aspects of future introductory programming courses in creative, innovative ways that benefit student learning.

CATS: Customizable Abstractive Topic-based Summarization

Neural sequence-to-sequence models are the state-of-the-art approach used in abstractive summarization of textual documents, useful for producing condensed versions of source text narratives without being restricted to using only words from the original text. Despite the advances in abstractive summarization, custom generation of summaries (e.g., towards a user’s preference) remains unexplored. In this article, we present CATS, an abstractive neural summarization model that summarizes content in a sequence-to-sequence fashion while also introducing a new mechanism to control the underlying latent topic distribution of the produced summaries. We empirically illustrate the efficacy of our model in producing customized summaries and present findings that facilitate the design of such systems. We use the well-known CNN/DailyMail dataset to evaluate our model. Furthermore, we present a transfer-learning method and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in a low resource setting, i.e., abstractive summarization of meetings minutes, where combining the main available meetings’ transcripts datasets, AMI and International Computer Science Institute(ICSI) , results in merely a few hundred training documents.

Exploring students’ and lecturers’ views on collaboration and cooperation in computer science courses - a qualitative analysis

Factors affecting student educational choices regarding oer material in computer science, export citation format, share document.

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• cs.SD - Sound ( new , recent , current month ) Covers all aspects of computing with sound, and sound as an information channel. Includes models of sound, analysis and synthesis, audio user interfaces, sonification of data, computer music, and sound signal processing. Includes ACM Subject Class H.5.5, and intersects with H.1.2, H.5.1, H.5.2, I.2.7, I.5.4, I.6.3, J.5, K.4.2.
• cs.SE - Software Engineering ( new , recent , current month ) Covers design tools, software metrics, testing and debugging, programming environments, etc. Roughly includes material in all of ACM Subject Classes D.2, except that D.2.4 (program verification) should probably have Logics in Computer Science as the primary subject area.
• cs.SI - Social and Information Networks ( new , recent , current month ) Covers the design, analysis, and modeling of social and information networks, including their applications for on-line information access, communication, and interaction, and their roles as datasets in the exploration of questions in these and other domains, including connections to the social and biological sciences. Analysis and modeling of such networks includes topics in ACM Subject classes F.2, G.2, G.3, H.2, and I.2; applications in computing include topics in H.3, H.4, and H.5; and applications at the interface of computing and other disciplines include topics in J.1--J.7. Papers on computer communication systems and network protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) are generally a closer fit to the Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) category.
• cs.SY - Systems and Control ( new , recent , current month ) cs.SY is an alias for eess.SY. This section includes theoretical and experimental research covering all facets of automatic control systems. The section is focused on methods of control system analysis and design using tools of modeling, simulation and optimization. Specific areas of research include nonlinear, distributed, adaptive, stochastic and robust control in addition to hybrid and discrete event systems. Application areas include automotive and aerospace control systems, network control, biological systems, multiagent and cooperative control, robotics, reinforcement learning, sensor networks, control of cyber-physical and energy-related systems, and control of computing systems.

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Computer science is the study and development of the protocols required for automated processing and manipulation of data. This includes, for example, creating algorithms for efficiently searching large volumes of information or encrypting data so that it can be stored and transmitted securely.

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You should be reading academic computer science papers

You read documentation and tutorials to become a better programmer, but if you really want to be cutting-edge, academic research is where it's at.

[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. This is our number one post of 2022! Thanks for reading and we’ll see you in the new year. ]

As working programmers, you need to keep learning all the time. You check out tutorials, documentation, Stack Overflow questions, anything you can find that will help you write code and keep your skills current. But how often do you find yourself digging into academic computer science papers to improve your programming chops?

While the tutorials can help you write code right now, it’s the academic papers that can help you understand where programming came from and where it’s going. Every programming feature, from the null pointer (aka the billion dollar mistake ) to objects (via Smalltalk ) has been built on a foundation of research that stretches back to the 1960s (and earlier). Future innovations will be built on the research of today.

We spoke to three of the members of the Papers We Love team, an online repository of their favorite computer science scholarship.

Zeeshan Lakhani, an engineering director at BlockFi, Darren Newton, an engineering team lead at Datadog, and David Ashby, a staff engineer at SageSure, all met while working at a company called Arc90. They found that none of them had formal training in computer science, but they all wanted to learn more. All three came from humanities and arts disciplines: Ashby has an English degree with a history minor, Newton went to art school twice, and Lakhani went to film school for undergrad before getting a master’s degree in music and audio engineering. All of those fields of study rely heavily on reading texts that built the foundation of the discipline as to understand the theory that underlies all practice.

Like any good student of the humanities, they went looking for answers in the archives. “I had a latent librarian inside,” said Newton. “So I'm always interested in the historical source material for the things that I do.”

Surveying history

As part of learning more about the history of programming, Ashby was reading Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine , about the race to design a 32-bit microcomputer in the late 70s. It covered both the engineering culture at the time and the problems and concepts those engineers wrestled with. This was before the time of mass-market CPUs and standard motherboard components, so a lot of what we take for granted today was still being worked out.

In Kidder’s book, Lakhani, Newton, and Ashby saw a whole history of computer science that they had no connection with, so they decided to try reading a foundational paper: Tony Hoare ’s “ Communicating Sequential Processes ” from 1978. They were working on Clojure and Clojurescript at the time, so this seemed relevant. When they sat down to discuss the paper, they realized they didn’t even know how to approach understanding it. “It was like, I can't understand half of this formalism, but maybe the intro is pretty good,” said Lakhani. “But we need someone like David Nolen to explain this to us.”

Nolen was an acquaintance who worked for The New York Times . He gave a talk there about Clojure and other Lisp-like languages, referencing a lot of John McCarthy’s early papers. Hearing this explanation with the academic context started turning a few gears in their minds. That’s when the idea of Papers We Love was born.

Knowing the history of the computing concepts that you use every day unlocks a lot of understanding into how they work at a practical level. The tools that you use, from databases to programming languages, are built on a foundation of academic research. “Understanding the roots of the things you're working on unlocks a lot of knowledge that you're not going to get purely just by using every day because you don't understand the paths that they didn't go down,” said Ashby.

There’s a talk they love that Bret Victor gave in 2013 called “ The Future of Programming .” He’s dressed like an engineer from the 70s, white button-up, khakis, pocket protector. He starts giving his talk using an overhead projector that has the name of the talk. He adjusts the slide and it reveals that the date is 1973. He goes on to talk about all the great things coming out of research, all the things that are going to shake up computer science. And they’re all things that the audience is still dealing with, like the move from sequential execution to concurrent models.

“The top theme was that it takes a long time,” said Lakhani. “There's a lot of things that are old that are new again, over and over and over.” The same problems are still relevant, whether because the problems are harder than once thought or because the research into those problems has been widely shared.

The trio behind Papers We Love aren’t alone in discovering a love for computing’s history. There is an increased interest in retrocomputing , engineers looking at the systems of the past to learn more about the practice of technology. It’s the flipside of looking at older papers; you look at the old hardware and software programmers used and work on it with a present-day mindset. “A lot of people are spinning up these ancient operating systems on Raspberry PIs and working with them,” said Newton. “Like spinning up an old Smalltalk VM on a Raspberry PI or recreating a PDP-10.”

When you see these issues in their initial contexts, like reading the research papers that tried to address them, you can get a better perspective on where you are now. That can lead to all sorts of epiphanies. “Oh, objects do the things they do because of Smalltalk back in the 80s,” said Ashby. “And that's why big systems look like that. And that's why Java looks like that.”

That new understanding can help you solve the problems that you face now.

The future of programming (today)

There’s more to reading research papers than understanding history; you can find new ways to solve problems by reading current research. “The idea of Stack Overflow is: someone else has had your problem before,” said Ashby. “Academic papers are: someone else has thought about this problem before.”

If your work involves building variations of the same old CRUD app in new spaces, then maybe research papers won’t help you. But if you are trying to solve the unique problems of your industry, then some of the research in those problem spaces may help you overcome them. “I find papers to expand the idea of what's possible with the work you do,” said Ashby. “They can help you appreciate that there are other ways to solve these problems.”

For Newton and his colleagues at Datadog, academic papers are an integral part of their work. Their monitoring software has to process a lot of information in real time to give engineers a view of their applications and the stack they run on. “We are very concerned with performance algorithms and better ways to do statistics on large volumes of data ,” said Newton. “We need to rely on academic research for some of that.”

Just because research exists, of course, it doesn’t mean your problems are automatically solved. Sometimes a single paper only gets you part of the solution. “I was at Comcast where we wanted to leverage load balancing work that we do in terms of routing,” said Lakhani. “We ended up applying three different kinds of papers that didn't know each other. We put semantics into network packets, routed them based on another paper via a specific protocol, and implemented a bunch of IETF specs. Part of this work now lives in a Rust library people can run today.” It's finding threads in academic work and braiding them together to solve the problems at hand.

Without reading those papers, Lakhani’s team wouldn’t have been able to design such an effective solution. Perhaps they would have gotten there on their own. But imagine the amount of work to research those three concepts; there’s no need to redo their work if it’s already been done. It’s standing on the shoulders of giants, as the saying goes, and if you’re on top of the research in your field, you know exactly which giants to stand on.

A map of the giants’ shoulders

Naturally, being a graduate of the humanities myself, I wanted to know which were the giants of computer science, those papers that would be on the syllabus if you were to construct a humanities-style curricula for a class. Think of it as a map of which giant shoulders you could stand on to get ahead.

It turns out, I’m not the first to wonder what’s in the computer science canon. In 1996, Phillip Laplante wrote Great Papers in Computer Science , which might be a bit outdated at this point. For a more recent take on the same thing, the trio recommend Ideas That Created the Future , published last year. Lakhani, who is now doing a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (my alma mater), points out that there was a course when he arrived that covered the important papers of the field.

In a way, this canon is exactly what the Papers We Love repo aims to create. It contains papers and links to papers organized by topic. The group welcomes new pull requests with academic papers that you all love and want to see spotlighted.

Here are a few papers (and talks) that they recommended to anyone wanting to get started reading the research:

• Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
• A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection
• Communicating Sequential Processes
• Out of the Tar Pit

Of course, there are many more.

If you’re intimidated by starting on a paper, then check out some of Papers We Love’s presentations , which offer a primer on how to understand a paper. The whole idea of these talks is borne out of that first frustration with a paper, then finding a path through it with someone else’s help. “They've gotten the CliffsNotes,” says Lakhani. “Now they can attack the paper and really understand it.”

The Papers We Love community continues to try to build a bridge between industry and academia. Everyone benefits—the industry gets access to new solutions without having to wait for someone else to implement and open-source them, and academics get to see their ideas tested and implemented in real situations.

“One of the goals of Papers We Love is to make it where you find out about stuff a little bit faster,” said Lakhani. “Maybe that changes things.”

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Mendeley Blog

The top 10 research papers in computer science by mendeley readership..

Since we recently announced our $10001 Binary Battle to promote applications built on the Mendeley API ( now including PLoS as well), I decided to take a look at the data to see what people have to work with. My analysis focused on our second largest discipline, Computer Science. Biological Sciences (my discipline) is the largest, but I started with this one so that I could look at the data with fresh eyes, and also because it’s got some really cool papers to talk about. Here’s what I found: What I found was a fascinating list of topics, with many of the expected fundamental papers like Shannon’s Theory of Information and the Google paper, a strong showing from Mapreduce and machine learning, but also some interesting hints that augmented reality may be becoming more of an actual reality soon.

LDA is a means of classifying objects, such as documents, based on their underlying topics. I was surprised to see this paper as number one instead of Shannon’s information theory paper (#7) or the paper describing the concept that became Google (#3). It turns out that interest in this paper is very strong among those who list artificial intelligence as their subdiscipline. In fact, AI researchers contributed the majority of readership to 6 out of the top 10 papers. Presumably, those interested in popular topics such as machine learning list themselves under AI, which explains the strength of this subdiscipline, whereas papers like the Mapreduce one or the Google paper appeal to a broad range of subdisciplines, giving those papers a smaller numbers spread across more subdisciplines. Professor Blei is also a bit of a superstar, so that didn’t hurt. (the irony of a manually-categorized list with an LDA paper at the top has not escaped us)

2. MapReduce : Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters (available full-text)

It’s no surprise to see this in the Top 10 either, given the huge appeal of this parallelization technique for breaking down huge computations into easily executable and recombinable chunks. The importance of the monolithic “Big Iron” supercomputer has been on the wane for decades. The interesting thing about this paper is that had some of the lowest readership scores of the top papers within a subdiscipline, but folks from across the entire spectrum of computer science are reading it. This is perhaps expected for such a general purpose technique, but given the above it’s strange that there are no AI readers of this paper at all.

3. The Anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual search engine (available full-text)

In this paper, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page discuss how Google was created and how it initially worked. This is another paper that has high readership across a broad swath of disciplines, including AI, but wasn’t dominated by any one discipline. I would expect that the largest share of readers have it in their library mostly out of curiosity rather than direct relevance to their research. It’s a fascinating piece of history related to something that has now become part of our every day lives.

4. Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints

This paper was new to me, although I’m sure it’s not new to many of you. This paper describes how to identify objects in a video stream without regard to how near or far away they are or how they’re oriented with respect to the camera. AI again drove the popularity of this paper in large part and to understand why, think “ Augmented Reality “. AR is the futuristic idea most familiar to the average sci-fi enthusiast as Terminator-vision . Given the strong interest in the topic, AR could be closer than we think, but we’ll probably use it to layer Groupon deals over shops we pass by instead of building unstoppable fighting machines.

5. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (available full-text)

This is another machine learning paper and its presence in the top 10 is primarily due to AI, with a small contribution from folks listing neural networks as their discipline, most likely due to the paper being published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. Reinforcement learning is essentially a technique that borrows from biology, where the behavior of an intelligent agent is is controlled by the amount of positive stimuli, or reinforcement, it receives in an environment where there are many different interacting positive and negative stimuli. This is how we’ll teach the robots behaviors in a human fashion, before they rise up and destroy us.

6. Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions (available full-text)

Popular among AI and information retrieval researchers, this paper discusses recommendation algorithms and classifies them into collaborative, content-based, or hybrid. While I wouldn’t call this paper a groundbreaking event of the caliber of the Shannon paper above, I can certainly understand why it makes such a strong showing here. If you’re using Mendeley, you’re using both collaborative and content-based discovery methods!

7. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (available full-text)

Now we’re back to more fundamental papers. I would really have expected this to be at least number 3 or 4, but the strong showing by the AI discipline for the machine learning papers in spots 1, 4, and 5 pushed it down. This paper discusses the theory of sending communications down a noisy channel and demonstrates a few key engineering parameters, such as entropy, which is the range of states of a given communication. It’s one of the more fundamental papers of computer science, founding the field of information theory and enabling the development of the very tubes through which you received this web page you’re reading now. It’s also the first place the word “bit”, short for binary digit, is found in the published literature.

8. The Semantic Web (available full-text)

In The Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Tim, the inventor of the World Wide Web, describes his vision for the web of the future. Now, 10 years later, it’s fascinating to look back though it and see on which points the web has delivered on its promise and how far away we still remain in so many others. This is different from the other papers above in that it’s a descriptive piece, not primary research as above, but still deserves it’s place in the list and readership will only grow as we get ever closer to his vision.

9. Convex Optimization (available full-text)

This is a very popular book on a widely used optimization technique in signal processing. Convex optimization tries to find the provably optimal solution to an optimization problem, as opposed to a nearby maximum or minimum. While this seems like a highly specialized niche area, it’s of importance to machine learning and AI researchers, so it was able to pull in a nice readership on Mendeley. Professor Boyd has a very popular set of video classes at Stanford on the subject, which probably gave this a little boost, as well. The point here is that print publications aren’t the only way of communicating your ideas. Videos of techniques at SciVee or JoVE or recorded lectures ( previously ) can really help spread awareness of your research.

10. Object recognition from local scale-invariant features (available in full-text)

This is another paper on the same topic as paper #4, and it’s by the same author. Looking across subdisciplines as we did here, it’s not surprising to see two related papers, of interest to the main driving discipline, appear twice. Adding the readers from this paper to the #4 paper would be enough to put it in the #2 spot, just below the LDA paper.

Conclusions

So what’s the moral of the story? Well, there are a few things to note. First of all, it shows that Mendeley readership data is good enough to reveal both papers of long-standing importance as well as interesting upcoming trends. Fun stuff can be done with this! How about a Mendeley leaderboard? You could grab the number of readers for each paper published by members of your group, and have some friendly competition to see who can get the most readers, month-over-month. Comparing yourself against others in terms of readers per paper could put a big smile on your face, or it could be a gentle nudge to get out to more conferences or maybe record a video of your technique for JoVE or Khan Academy or just Youtube.

Another thing to note is that these results don’t necessarily mean that AI researchers are the most influential researchers or the most numerous, just the best at being accounted for. To make sure you’re counted properly, be sure you list your subdiscipline on your profile, or if you can’t find your exact one, pick the closest one, like the machine learning folks did with the AI subdiscipline. We recognize that almost everyone does interdisciplinary work these days. We’re working on a more flexible discipline assignment system, but for now, just pick your favorite one.

These stats were derived from the entire readership history, so they do reflect a founder effect to some degree. Limiting the analysis to the past 3 months would probably reveal different trends and comparing month-to-month changes could reveal rising stars.

Technical details: To do this analysis I queried the Mendeley database, analyzed the data using R , and prepared the figures with Tableau Public . A similar analysis can be done dynamically using the Mendeley API . The API returns JSON, which can be imported into R using the fine RJSONIO package from Duncan Temple Lang and Carl Boettiger is implementing the Mendeley API in R . You could also interface with the Google Visualization API to make motion charts showing a dynamic representation of this multi-dimensional data. There’s all kinds of stuff you could do, so go have some fun with it. I know I did.

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2 thoughts on “ the top 10 research papers in computer science by mendeley readership. ”.

You might consider revisiting the subdiscipline list, e.g. split computer vision, robotics and machine learning from AI, since the latest is a fuzzy and uncertain concept. Neural networks could be combined with machine learning, though.

Especially in fast-growing fields like computer science, discipline will always be a somewhat fuzzy concept. We are working on a way for people to assign themselves and papers to disciplines in a more flexible way.

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Reference management. Clean and simple.

The top list of computer science research databases

1. ACM Digital Library

2. ieee xplore digital library, 3. dblp computer science bibliography, 4. springer lecture notes in computer science (lncs), frequently asked questions about computer science research databases, related articles.

Besides the interdisciplinary research databases Web of Science and Scopus there are also academic databases specifically dedicated to computer science. We have compiled a list of the top 4 research databases with a special focus on computer science to help you find research papers, scholarly articles, and conference papers fast.

ACM Digital Library is the clear number one when it comes to academic databases for computer science. The ACM Full-Text Collection currently has 540,000+ articles, while the ACM Guide to Computing Literature holds more than 2.8+ million bibliographic entries.

• Coverage: 2.8+ million articles
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✘
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Full text: ✔ (requires institutional subscription)
• Export formats: BibTeX, EndNote

Pro tip: Use a reference manager like Paperpile to keep track of all your sources. Paperpile integrates with ACM Digital Library and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons and later cite them in thousands of citation styles:

IEEE Xplore holds more than 4.7 million research articles from the fields of electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. It not only covers articles published in scholarly journals, but also conference papers, technical standards, as well as some books.

• Coverage: 4.7+ million articles
• Export formats: BibTeX, RIS

Hosted at the University of Trier, Germany, dbpl has become an indispensable resource in the field of computer science. Its index covers journal articles, conference and workshop proceedings, as well as monographs.

• Coverage: 4.3 million articles
• Abstracts: ✘
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Full text: ✘ (Links to publisher websites available)
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science is the number one publishing source for conference proceedings covering all areas of computer science.

• Coverage: 415,000+ articles
• Export formats: RIS, EndNote, BibTeX

Hosted at the University of Trier, Germany, dbpl has become an indispensable resource in the field of computer science. It's index covers journal articles, conference and workshop proceedings, as well as monographs.

Microsoft Academic was a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research. It had more than 13.9 million articles indexed. It was shut down in 2022.

EEE Xplore holds more than 4.7 million research articles from the fields of electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. It not only covers articles published in scholarly journals, but also conference papers, technical standards, as well as some books.