The Evolution of IJHCS and CHI: A Quantitative Analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes 50 years of scholarly data from IJHCS and CHI to understand the evolution of HCI research, revealing geopolitical patterns, emerging trends, and citation dynamics in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the evolution of HCI research through IJHCS and CHI, highlighting key trends and patterns over five decades.

Findings

Identification of significant geopolitical influences on research trends

Emergence of key topics in HCI over time

Insights into citation dynamics and research impact

Abstract

In this paper we focus on the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) as a domain of analysis, to gain insights about its evolution in the past 50 years and what this evolution tells us about the research landscape associated with the journal. To this purpose we use techniques from the field of Science of Science and analyse the relevant scholarly data to identify a variety of phenomena, including significant geopolitical patterns, the key trends that emerge from a topic-centric analysis, and the insights that can be drawn from an analysis of citation data. Because the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has always been a central focus for IJHCS, we also include in the analysis the CHI conference, which is the premiere scientific venue in HCI. Analysing both venues provides more data points to our study and allows us to consider two alternative viewpoints on the evolution of HCI research.