Evolution of the CAiSE author community - a social network analysis

The CAiSE community has always prided itself as more than just a normal conference - a successful social network with a very special culture. In this chapter, we apply formal social network analysis to study this community and its evolution of its first quarter-centennial of existence. Using a methodology and dataset developed for an analysis of Computer Science as a whole, we demonstrate the unusual positioning of CAiSE as a quasi-interdisciplinary conference between several sub-disciplines of Computer Science. We show that under an evolution model developed in our research CAiSE pursues a very successful and promising path, and we identify key topics and key players among the CAiSE authors. As the social network analysis focusses on formal aspects such as co-authorship and citations, we unfortunately must leave out one of the undoubtedly most critical success factors: the fun of being in the CAiSE community.