An Exploratory Study Comparing the Core Concepts of Information Systems Development and Software Engineering

The goal of this study is to apply a multidisciplinary approach towards the discovery of core concepts in the art and science of design. This study advances the intellectual body of knowledge for design science by uncovering common areas of agreement between information systems (IS) and computer science (CS) encouraging the development of new design theories within each individual field. This research avoids the trap of finding “yet another methodology” by merging the two dichotomous paradigms of design-as-natural-science and design-as-human-science, and by viewing the common concepts from these approaches through various philosophical lenses. These philosophical lenses ensure that the foundations for art and science of design will be capable of explaining the laws and theories of design and not merely reproduce a set of rules and procedures

Highly-cited papers in software engineering: The top 100

Context: According to the search reported in this paper, as of this writing (May 2015), a very large number of papers (more than 70,000) have been published in the area of Software Engineering (SE) since its inception in 1968. Citations are crucial in any research area to position the work and to build on the work of others. Identification and characterization of highly-cited papers are common and are regularly reported in various disciplines. Objective: The objective of this study is to identify the papers in the area of SE that have influenced others the most as measured by citation count. Studying highly-cited SE papers helps researchers to see the type of approaches and research methods presented and applied in such papers, so as to be able to learn from them to write higher quality papers which will likely receive high citations. Method: To achieve the above objective, we conducted a study, comprised of five research questions, to identify and classify the top-100 highly-cited SE papers in terms of two metrics: total number of citations and average annual number of citations. Results: By total number of citations, the top paper is "A metrics suite for object-oriented design", cited 1,817 times and published in 1994. By average annual number of citations, the top paper is "QoS-aware middleware for Web services composition", cited 154.2 times on average annually and published in 2004. Conclusion: It is concluded that it is important to identify the highly-cited SE papers and also to characterize the overall citation landscape in the SE field. We hope that this paper will encourage further discussions in the SE community towards further analysis and formal characterization of the highly-cited SE papers.Vahid Garousi was partially supported by several internal grants provided by the Hacettepe University. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments

Scientific Publication Map of Journals Published in the Field of Educational Sciences in Turkey: An Analysis Impact Factors of Journals

Bu araştırmada, Türkiye’de eğitim bilimleri alanında yayımlanan bilimsel dergilerin atıf analizlerinin ve etki faktörlerinin belirlenmesi amaçlanmıştır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, 32 hakemli bilimsel dergide 2005- 2014 yılları arasında yayımlanan 7681 makale üzerinden kapsamlı bir atıf analizi yapılmış ve sonrasında ise her bir dergiye ilişkin etki faktörleri belirlenmiştir. Araştırmada veri kaynağı olarak kullanılan dergilerin belirlenmesinde, dergilerin kapsamı ve isimlerinde ‘eğitim’, ‘öğretim’, ‘eğitim bilimleri’, ‘öğretmen eğitimi’ ve ‘öğretmen yetiştirme’ sözcükleri olması ölçüt olarak belirlenmiştir. Araştırma kapsamında elde edilen 7681 makale ve 15052 atıfa ilişkin her veriye bir kod numarası verilmiş ve daha sonra veri temizleme ve düzeltme işlemleri gerçekleştirilmiştir. Araştırmada bibliyometrik ve etki faktörü analizleri öncesinde makalelerin yıllara ve dergilere göre dağılımları için frekans (f) ve yüzde (%) değerleri hesaplanarak tanımlayıcı istatistikler üretilmiş, dergilerin etki faktörlerinin belirlenmesi için etki faktörü katsayısından yararlanılmıştır. Araştırmada kapsamında incelenen makalelerde en fazla atıf yapılan ilk üç dergi, (i) Hacettepe Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, (ii) Kuram ve Uygulamada Eğitim Bilimleri ve (iii) Ankara Üniversitesi Eğitim Bilimleri Fakültesi Dergisi’dir. Araştırma kapsamında ele alınan eğitim bilimleri dergilerinin 2014 yılı etki faktörü katsayısı incelendiği zaman, en yüksek etki faktörü katsayısına sahip dergilerin (i) Kuram ve Uygulamada Eğitim Bilimleri, (ii) Kuram ve Uygulamada Eğitim Yönetimi Dergisi ve (iii) Kuramsal Eğitimbilim Dergisi olduğu saptanmıştır.In this study, it is aimed to determine the reference analysis of scientific journal published in educational sciences field in Turkey and their impact factors. In accordance with this purpose, a detailed reference analysis was made on 7681 articles published in 32 peer- reviewed scientific journal between 2005-2014 and then impact factor of each journal was determined. While deciding the journals to be used as data source in the study, the criteria was that contents and names of journals should have the words ‘education’, ‘instruction’, ‘educational sciences’, ‘teacher education’, and ‘teacher training’. A code number was given to each data of 7681 articles and 15052 references which was taken within the scope of the study and data removing and correction procedures were followed. Before bibliometric and impact factor analysis, descriptive analysis were conducted to measure frequencies (f) and percent (%) values of the articles by years and journals and impact factor coefficient was used to assess the impact factors. . The first three journals that are most referred in the articles which were investigated within the scope of the study are: (i) Hacettepe University Journal of Education, (ii) Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice (iii) Ankara University Journal of Faculty of Educational Sciences. When the year 2014 impact factor coefficients of the journals in the study were investigated, the highest impact factor coefficients were seen in (i) Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, (ii) Educational Administration: Theory & Practice and (iii) The Journal of Theoretical Educational Science

Code Smells and Refactoring: A Tertiary Systematic Review of Challenges and Observations

In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know) on code smells and refactoring. We show that code smells and refactoring have a strong relationship with quality attributes, i.e., with understandability, maintainability, testability, complexity, functionality, and reusability. We argue that code smells and refactoring could be considered as the two faces of a same coin. Besides, we identify how refactoring affects quality attributes, more than code smells. We also discuss the implications of this work for practitioners, researchers, and instructors. We identify 13 open issues that could guide future research work. Thus, we want to highlight the gap between code smells and refactoring in the current state of software-engineering research. We wish that this work could help the software-engineering research community in collaborating on future work on code smells and refactoring