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Analyzing worldwide research in hardware architecture, 1997-2011
Singh V., Perdigones A., Garcia J., Cañas-Guerroro I., Mazarrón F. Communications of the ACM58 (1):76-85,2015.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Apr 1 2015

This is a curious article. When asked to prepare a review, there was no abstract, so the assignment was a bit open ended. The article seemed to be of interest; any analysis of hardware architectures from 1997 to 2011 should be interesting and provide insight into how the field has progressed. Alas, the article, while of interest, is mistitled. It should be “Analyzing worldwide distribution of hardware architecture technical papers, 1997-2011,” since it could be characterized as an information retrieval (IR) exercise using keyword analysis of some 51,000 articles published in the interval. The techniques harken back to the early IR days of the late 1960s.

Figure 1 shows how the most frequently used keywords changed over the interval. Figure 2 shows how many papers, how many authors per paper, and how many citations changed over the interval--they went up, up, and down. Figure 3 shows the geographic distribution. The US leads by three times the number of Japanese and Chinese papers, with the rest of the world lagging far behind. A close examination of the figure provides five three-year snapshots for each country.

The authors developed a set of “scientific production indicators” based upon such data points as the number of papers produced by a country, the number of authors, the number of research institutions, the calculated impact of papers, and the number of citations for countries and institutions. The results of these indicators are presented in Tables 1 through 3 and Figure 4.

The authors draw a conclusion relating to how the keyword vocabulary evolved over time. They note the emergence of keywords such as networks, sensors, security, automated teller machine (ATM), and very large-scale integration (VLSI) in the later years. They also note that the US dominated the field, but do not comment on any apparent ethnicity of the authors in the study.

Finally, the importance of this article is questioned. It may be a tour de force in the use of keyword analysis, but its overall results seem rather obvious. Anyone seeking insight into worldwide hardware research between 1997 and 2011 will be disappointed.

Reviewer:  J. S. Edwards Review #: CR143301 (1507-0581)
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