# Leveraging Social Network Analysis for Crowdsourced Software Engineering Research
## 5 Discussion and Conclusions  
This study collected, cleaned, and analyzed two network datasets: co-authorship networks and citation networks for CSE publications. A total of 509 publications reporting on CSE research were retrieved. This study further examined the co-authorship network in terms of the author, country, and institution to investigate co-authorship collaborations and their impact on CSE research performance. We also examined author performance in the co-authorship network of CSE using productivity and centrality measures. [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] were the three most productive authors based on their number of publications. They were affiliated with the Stevens Institute of Technology in the United States, Nanjing University in China, and Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, respectively. In the degree centrality index, [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] had the highest numbers of co-authorships with other authors. They were active authors in the network and used various collaborations to meet their research needs. We noted that not all of the highly productive authors were also the authors with the most collaborations. This may have been due to their tendency to co-author with the same authors. The degree centrality showed how authors who were linked to many others had a better performance than those with fewer links and had more opportunities to co-author CSE publications owing to the number of direct links they had. Researchers can benefit from this study; they can expand their collaborative research in CSE by contacting people with the highest betweenness centrality because they are likely to be in the shortest path between two other authors. They also play an important role in controlling the flow of information in the network. Additionally, researchers can learn about the most important and influential authors from this study by looking at the findings on the highest closeness centrality and eigenvector centrality. There were 324 institutions contributing to CSE-based research. The University of California, which published 30 papers involving 22 authors, was ranked as the most productive among all the identified universities/institutions. Its authors preferred to work with their colleagues from the same institution more than with those from other institutions. Therefore, it may be appropriate to suggest that authors expand their network of contacts and collaborate with others from different institutions to have an opportunity to improve their CSE research performance. Based on the centrality degree, Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom had the highest degree of collaboration. Its authors collaborated with authors from different institutions for CSE publications. However, we noted that the highest number of co-authoring collaborative institutions was in China, and most of these institutions cooperated with those in the United States. This may have been due to the number of Chinese authors affiliated with these institutions. For example, the most productive author, [PERSON], who is of Chinese origin, is affiliated with the Stevens Institute of Technology in the United States. To assess the international co-authorship of countries, the co-authorship network of countries was studied. There were 47 countries participating in publishing research on CSE. With respect to the distribution of CSE publications, most of them originated in China. We conclude that China is the leading country in CSE research, and it had made advancements in this field. Chinese authors play a dominant role in the field, followed closely by those from the United States. This may have been due to the fact that most of the CSE platforms are created in these two countries. China and the United States also had the highest numbers of international collaborations in CSE research between them, indicating that most Chinese authors collaborated in the field of CSE with US authors. They were the two core sources of CSE publications.