Investigating the Relation Between Authors' Academic Age and Their Citations

The increasing number of authors and consequent publications in computer science can cause some pitfalls, such as understanding the use and fairness of quality indicators for assessing research. In this preliminary work, we aim to examine whether there is a correlation between the citation count and the number of authors contributing to a paper as well as their academic ages. Additionally, we shed light on highly cited papers and compare their authors. For this purpose, we investigate authors' characteristics by conducting data analyses based on a dataset of four prestigious software-engineering-related conferences comprising 5,143 papers and their authors. Our results indicate that the number of authors does not connect to the citation count, but the current academic age of the authors does. We also found that 98% of the highly cited main-track papers had a contribution from at least one senior researcher, whereas none of these papers was written by a junior researcher alone. These first results are a step towards more in-depth research concerning the fair evaluation of computer-science researchers-specifically regarding juniors and their inclusion.