Trend Analysis on the Metadata of Program Comprehension Papers
This provides an overview of research trends for scholars in program comprehension, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to analyze metadata.
The authors tackled the problem of identifying trends in program comprehension research by performing n-gram frequency analysis on metadata from 1885 articles from 2000-2014, finding that feature location and open source systems are rising while program slicing and legacy systems are falling.
As program comprehension is a vast research area, it is necessary to get an overview of its rising and falling trends. We performed an n-gram frequency analysis on titles, abstracts and keywords of 1885 articles about program comprehension from the years 2000-2014. According to this analysis, the most rising trends are feature location and open source systems, the most falling ones are program slicing and legacy systems.