This paper was presented at CSCW in Banff, Canada, Nov 4-8, 2006.
Authors:

  • Michal Jacovi
  • Natalia Marmasse
  • Vladimir Soroka
  • Sigalit Ur
  • Elad Shahar
  • Gail Gilboa-Freedman
  • all from BM Research Lab in Haifa, Israel


This paper analyzed the citation histories between CSCW papers over the past 20 years, looking at which papers cited each other and which topics the conference has spanned. Interesting if you consider yourself at all involved in this community. And there are several visualizations of the citation history that are cool.

The majority of papers at CSCW fall into either the category of “computer science” or “social science.” Outside of those two groups, there are two smaller clusters of papers that can be described as on “shared media spaces” and “instant messenger and presence.” And there is not a lot of cross-citing between these four groups. As someone pointed out in a conversation afterwards, that doesn’t mean the CS-types and Social-Science-types don’t go to each others’ talks or read each others’ papers or appreciate each others’ work. It just means that when they write papers, they cite the work that is most similar to their own. So they may not be as inspired by the different perspectives in the community as we might hope an indisciplinary community might be. As seems to be the tendency in our research community, this made us a little sad.

There are 17 key papers in CSCW that are not cited by any other CSCW papers but are popular with outside communities, particularly CHI. These span different HCI topics and some of them could be described as guest-style papers. So maybe CSCW has had an impact even if we ignore our own genius?