Thirteen Years of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) Conference - What is the Bibliography Data Telling Us?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes 13 years of MSR conference publications to understand its evolution, strengths, and future directions through bibliometric and scientific publication mining methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of MSR conference history, highlighting trends, growth areas, and potential future research directions.

Findings

Identified key research topics over the years

Detected growth patterns in publication volume

Highlighted emerging areas in MSR research

Abstract

The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference is a reputed, long-running and flagship conference in the area of Software Analytics which has successfully completed more than one decade as of year 2016. We conduct a bibliometric and scientific publication mining based study to study how the conference has evolved over the recent past 13 years (from 2004 to 2007 as a workshop and then from 2008 to 2016 as a conference). Our objective is to perform an examination of the state of MSR so that the MSR community can identify strengths, areas of improvements and future directions for the conference.