Conferences are key publication venues, specially for some areas in computer science. Therefore, targeting the right conference is an important task and a difficult one. On the one hand, there exist many conference in Computer Science (I’d say too many!). On the other hand, conferences evolve and their quality can change over time. Some quality indicators, like the acceptance rate, are easy to find (if not, the conference is not worth your time), while others, such as the number of new authors every year, which could give a feeling on the conference endogamic level, are ususally not available unless you take the time to compute that information manually by browing yourself the conference webpage, list of accepted papers,…

MetaScience is a new tool that can be deployed as an online service.  We have developed it to help on this critical matter. The current version relies on the database provided by DBLP, to derive some useful metrics for conferences and authors.

The set of metrics for conferences are:

• Conference activity and ratios. It provides the overall number of authors and papers for each conference edition, as well as the the number of authors per paper and papers per author for each edition. These are two screenshots of the visualization for the Models conference:

• Community turnover. It calculates the percentage of authors that survived/perished between the editions of the conference. This is a screenshot of the visualization for Models as well (you can visit the website to interact with it):

• Openness. It measures how much the community underlying a conference is open towards newcomers. Thus, for each edition it presents the ratio between papers coming from authors that have never published in the conference before (outsiders) as well as the papers with all authors having published there already (community member).

• Co-author connections. It shows a graph were all the authors publishing in the conference are shown as nodes. The bigger the node the more papers the author has published. Moreover, two authors are linked if they are co-authors. This visualization allows locating collaboration groups in the community of the conference.

The set of metrics for authors are:

• Author activity. It provides the overall number of publications the author has published. This is a screenshot of the visualization for the Jordi Cabot author (you can visit the website to interact with it):

• Collaboration evolution. We calculate per year: (1) the average number of co-authors per paper and (2) total author contribution to the papers published by the author in that year. This (and the following ones) is a screenshot of the visualization for Jordi Cabot:

• Co-author network It shows the set of authors who collaborated with the selected author. Each co-author is shown as node, the bigger the node the more papers have been published together.

• Venues networks. This visualization is similar to the previous one, but nodes represent venues.

Javier Cánovas

I’m an Associate Professor at UOC and researcher at SOM Research Team, in Barcelona, Spain. My research interests are mainly focused on Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), Domain-Specific Languages and Collaborative Development.