Friday, February 01, 2008

DBLP Complete Search

I often look at DBLP to find bibtex entries for papers and links to their electronic editions. Now that Holger Bast has produced CompleteSearch, one can use DBLP also as an after-lunch amenity to find more publication data for computer scientists and conferences/journals in the field.

Do you want to know who has published the most in, say, Theoretical Computer Science? Look here, and you'll find that Grzegorz Rozenberg has published a whopping 62 (!) papers in that journal. What about Information and Computation? A look at this page yields that Sanjay Jain is the top scorer with 19 papers. (That researcher also has 20 TCS papers.) Top scorer for JACM is Seymour Ginsburg with 23 papers, with Christos Papadimitriou second with 21 entries. A look at the page for LICS reveals that Moshe Vardi has published 22 papers in that conference, and he is way ahead of the rest of the pack.

I'll stop here, since I do not want to spoil the fun you might have playing with this new feature. Well done, Holger!


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's whopping number of publications is mainly due to the fact that Grzegorz Rozenberg is the Editor-in-chief of Theoretical Computer Science.

Anonymous said...

yep, 8 papers of Grzegorz are editorials, but the other 54 are regular papers.

Luca Aceto said...

Hossein,

You are right, Rozenberg was the editor-in-chief of TCS as a whole. (Nowadays Giorgio Ausiello and Don Sannella fulfill this role. See the journal's home page. Rozenberg sits on the editorial board for TCS-A and TCS-B, ans he is editor-in-chief of Theoretical Computer Science C: Theory of Natural Computing.)

It is indeed open to debate whether it is becoming that the editor-in-chief of a journal submit papers to that journal during the period when (s)he serves in that role. In passing, I have noticed that it is becoming more common for colleagues to publish papers in special issues of journals that they co-edit, and sometimes of conferences that they co-chair. A discussion of this phenomenon deserves a post of its own, which I was planning to write at some point soon.

However, saying that Rozenberg's whopping number of publications in TCS is mainly due to his being editor-in-chief of that journal is a very strong statement. Rozenberg has been, and still is, a very prolific researcher over a long period of time. A look at DBLP via CompleteSearch indicates that Rozenberg is the fourth most prolific author in the DBLP database with 410 entries. He also published 24 papers in Information and Control, 16 in IPL and JCSS, and 11 in ICALP. Moreover, Rozenberg has written 6 books, and is a (co-)editor of more than 70 books. A look at his web page indicates a level of research activity and service to the TCS community that is commendable to say the least.

As far as quality and impact of Grzegorz's research are concerned, time will be the judge, like for all of us.

Anonymous said...

Luca,

I absolutely agree with you. I made a strong statement for such a celebrated researcher; actually I did not mean it.