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Turing Award elites revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact

Turing Award elites revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact
Turing Award elites revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact
The Turing Award is recognized as the most influential and prestigious award in the field of computer science (CS). With the rise of the science of science, a large amount of bibliographic data has been analyzed in an attempt to understand the hidden mechanism of scientific evolution. These include the analysis of the Nobel Prize, including physics, chemistry, medicine, etc. In this article, we extract and analyze the data of 72 Turing Award laureates from the complete bibliographic data, fill the gap in the lack of Turing Award analysis, and discover the development characteristics of CS as an independent discipline. First, we show most Turing Award laureates have long-term and high-quality educational backgrounds, and more than 61% of them have a degree in mathematics, which indicates that mathematics has played a significant role in the development of CS. Secondly, the data shows that not all scholars have high productivity and high h-index; that is, the number of publications and h-index is not the leading indicator for evaluating the Turing Award. Third, the average age of awardees has increased from 40 to around 70 in recent years. This may be because new breakthroughs take longer, and some new technologies need time to prove their influence. Besides, we have also found that in the past 10 years, international collaboration has experienced explosive growth, showing a new paradigm in the form of collaboration. It is also worth noting that in recent years, the emergence of female winners has also been eye-catching. Finally, by analyzing the personal publication records, we find that many people are more likely to publish high-impact articles during their high-yield periods.

Computer science elites, Science of science, Turing award
2329-2348
Jin, Yinyu
71527d36-9e6b-479f-bcf6-5a234a7a2f55
YUAN, SHA
38f55c31-5145-40da-9777-d9ca2219c3e0
Shao, Zhou
2762e4e9-e550-4f18-a11c-f57520cf8b53
Hall, Wendy
11f7f8db-854c-4481-b1ae-721a51d8790c
Tang, Jie
69c44bae-b1fa-45eb-a01d-3ac5b00fa749
Jin, Yinyu
71527d36-9e6b-479f-bcf6-5a234a7a2f55
YUAN, SHA
38f55c31-5145-40da-9777-d9ca2219c3e0
Shao, Zhou
2762e4e9-e550-4f18-a11c-f57520cf8b53
Hall, Wendy
11f7f8db-854c-4481-b1ae-721a51d8790c
Tang, Jie
69c44bae-b1fa-45eb-a01d-3ac5b00fa749

Jin, Yinyu, YUAN, SHA, Shao, Zhou, Hall, Wendy and Tang, Jie (2021) Turing Award elites revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact. Scientometrics, 126 (3), 2329-2348. (doi:10.1007/s11192-020-03860-4).

Record type: Article

Abstract

The Turing Award is recognized as the most influential and prestigious award in the field of computer science (CS). With the rise of the science of science, a large amount of bibliographic data has been analyzed in an attempt to understand the hidden mechanism of scientific evolution. These include the analysis of the Nobel Prize, including physics, chemistry, medicine, etc. In this article, we extract and analyze the data of 72 Turing Award laureates from the complete bibliographic data, fill the gap in the lack of Turing Award analysis, and discover the development characteristics of CS as an independent discipline. First, we show most Turing Award laureates have long-term and high-quality educational backgrounds, and more than 61% of them have a degree in mathematics, which indicates that mathematics has played a significant role in the development of CS. Secondly, the data shows that not all scholars have high productivity and high h-index; that is, the number of publications and h-index is not the leading indicator for evaluating the Turing Award. Third, the average age of awardees has increased from 40 to around 70 in recent years. This may be because new breakthroughs take longer, and some new technologies need time to prove their influence. Besides, we have also found that in the past 10 years, international collaboration has experienced explosive growth, showing a new paradigm in the form of collaboration. It is also worth noting that in recent years, the emergence of female winners has also been eye-catching. Finally, by analyzing the personal publication records, we find that many people are more likely to publish high-impact articles during their high-yield periods.

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Turing Award elites revisited patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact - Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 27 December 2020
e-pub ahead of print date: 5 February 2021
Published date: March 2021
Additional Information: Funding Information: The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 61806111, NSFC for Distinguished Young Scholar under Grant No. 61825602 and National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2020AAA010520002. Funding Information: The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 61806111, NSFC for Distinguished Young Scholar under Grant No. 61825602 and National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2020AAA010520002. Publisher Copyright: © 2021, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
Keywords: Computer science elites, Science of science, Turing award

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 447802
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/447802
PURE UUID: 9b1d1671-e891-42fd-95d4-27077c169975
ORCID for Wendy Hall: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-4327-7811

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Date deposited: 23 Mar 2021 17:32
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 06:25

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Contributors

Author: Yinyu Jin
Author: SHA YUAN
Author: Zhou Shao
Author: Wendy Hall ORCID iD
Author: Jie Tang

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