Turing Number: How Far Are You to A. M. Turing Award?

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Turing Number (TN), a novel metric measuring a scholar's proximity to Turing Award laureates based on collaboration networks, reflecting academic influence and reputation.

Contribution

The paper proposes the Turing Number (TN) index, inspired by Erdos and Bacon Numbers, to quantify scholars' closeness to Turing Award laureates using shortest path analysis.

Findings

TN correlates with scholarly influence metrics

TN reflects collaboration proximity to laureates

TN can indicate academic reputation

Abstract

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is commonly acknowledged as the highest distinction in the realm of computer science. Since 1960s, it has been awarded to computer scientists who made outstanding contributions. The significance of this award is far-reaching to the laureates as well as their research teams. However, unlike the Nobel Prize that has been extensively investigated, little research has been done to explore this most important award. To this end, we propose the Turing Number (TN) index to measure how far a specific scholar is to this award. Inspired by previous works on Erdos Number and Bacon Number, this index is defined as the shortest path between a given scholar to any Turing Award Laureate. Experimental results suggest that TN can reflect the closeness of collaboration between scholars and Turing Award Laureates. With the correlation analysis between TN and metrics from the bibliometric-level and network-level, we demonstrate that TN has the potential of reflecting a scholar's academic influence and reputation.