A Data-Driven Analysis for Engineering Conferences: The Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering (IISE) Annual Conference Proceedings (2002-2025)
H. Sinan Bank, Casey E. Eaton

TL;DR
This study employs computational methods, including NLP and network analysis, to map the thematic evolution, influential works, and community structure of the Industrial and Systems Engineering field over two decades, providing a comprehensive historical overview.
Contribution
It introduces a large-scale, data-driven approach using LLMs and network science to analyze the evolution of ISE research from 2002 to 2025, which is novel in scope and methodology.
Findings
Identified key research themes and their evolution over time
Mapped influential papers and authors in ISE
Revealed collaboration and citation networks within the community
Abstract
Charting the intellectual evolution of a scientific discipline is crucial for identifying its core contributions, challenges, and future directions. The IISE Annual Conference proceedings offer a rich longitudinal archive of the Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) community's development, but the sheer volume of scholarship produced over two decades makes a holistic analysis difficult. Traditional reviews often fail to capture the full scale of thematic shifts and complex collaboration networks that define the community's growth. This paper presents a computational analysis of IISE proceedings from 2002 to 2025, drawing on an initial dataset of 9,350 titles from ProQuest for thematic analysis and 8,958 titles from Google Scholar for citation analysis, to deliver a cartography of the ISE field's intellectual history. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain-aware…
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Taxonomy
Topicsscientometrics and bibliometrics research · E-Learning and Knowledge Management · Computational and Text Analysis Methods
