On computer science research and its temporal evolution

In this article, we study the evolution of the computer science research community over the past 30 years. Analyzing data from the full Scopus database, we investigate how aspects such as the community size, gender composition, and the academic seniority of its members changed over time. We also shed light on the varying popularity of specific research areas, as derived from the ACM’s Special Interest Groups and IEEE classifications. Our analysis spans 19 nations (all members of the G20 group, excluding the EU) and involves a total of 728,374 authors and 8,412,543 publications. This work shows that the overall size of the computer science community has increased by a factor of ten in the time period 1991-2020, with China and India enjoying the highest growth. At the same time, this increase has not been uniform across research areas. Female participation has also increased, but more slowly than expected and not uniformly across countries and areas.