Five Decades of the ACM Sp ecial Interest Group on
Data Communications (SIGCOMM):
A Bibliometric Perspe ctive
Waleed Iqbal
Information Technology University
(ITU)-Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
waleed.iqbal@itu.edu.pk
Junaid Qadir
Information Technology University
(ITU)-Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
junaid.qadir@itu.edu.pk
Saeed-Ul Hassan
Information Technology University
(ITU)-Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
saeed-ul-hassan@itu.edu.pk
Rana Tallal Javed
Information Technology University
(ITU)-Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
tallal.javed@itu.edu.pk
Adnan Noor Mian
Computer Laboratory, University of
Cambridge, United Kingdom
anm42@cl.cam.ac.uk
Jon Crowcroft
∗
Computer Laboratory, University of
Cambridge, United Kingdom
jon.crowcroft@cl.cam.ac.uk
Gareth Tyson
∗
Queen Mary University of London,
United Kingdom
gareth.tyson@qmul.ac.uk
This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed.
The authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online.
ABSTRACT
The ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIG-
COMM) has been a major research forum for fty years. This com-
munity has had a major impact on the history of the Internet, and
therefore we argue its exploration may reveal fundamental insights
into the evolution of networking technologies around the globe.
Hence, on the 50
th
anniversary of SIGCOMM, we take this opportu-
nity to reect upon its progress and achievements, through the lens
of its various publication outlets, e.g., the SIGCOMM conference,
IMC, CoNEXT, HotNets. Our analysis takes several perspectives,
looking at authors, countries, institutes and papers. We explore
trends in co-authorship, country-based productivity, and knowl-
edge ow to and from SIGCOMM venues using bibliometric tech-
niques. We hope this study will serve as a valuable resource for the
computer networking community.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Applied computing → Digital libraries and archives
;
• Gen-
eral and reference → General conference proceedings;
KEYWORDS
Co-authorship Patterns, Bibliometrics, Computer Networking, So-
cial Network Analysis, Full-text
∗
Authors also aliated with the Alan Turing Institute.
1 INTRODUCTION
The ACM’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIG-
COMM) has performed a pivotal role in the development of com-
puter networking. The research area has grown over decades, bridg-
ing work from three major domains: Computer Science, Electrical
Engineering, and Computer Engineering. On the 50
th
anniversary
of SIGCOMM’s foundation, we believe it is timely and worthwhile
to explore its history and role, via the publication of cutting edge
research. We approach this problem through a bibliometric analysis
of SIGCOMM’s various publication outlets, covering 50 years of ac-
cepted research articles (ranging from 1969 to 2018). These accepted
papers are published in main proceedings, aliated proceedings,
and aliated workshops of SIGCOMM events. Using our dataset,
we explore bibliometric questions and examine publication behav-
iors. Through this study, we strive to reveal major contributors
to all venues under the umbrella of SIGCOMM, as summarized in
Table 1. Although a number of past bibliometric studies have been
conducted in various elds ([
1
–
8
]), our work is the rst to focus on
the overall literature of SIGCOMM.
We start by explaining the details of our dataset in Section 2. We
then discuss the results generated by our data, and highlight key
observations in Section 3. Finally, we conclude by summarizing our
analysis in Section 4. This paper intends to oer some initial in-
sights and visualizations of the research activities within SIGCOMM
venues. We do not, however, strive to provide comprehensive or
deep coverage of all activities within SIGCOMM. Consequently, to
facilitate further research, we have publicly shared the dataset used
in this paper.
1
. We also have developed an interactive visualization
1
https://github.com/waleediqbal411/CCR-paper-data2019
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 49 Issue 5, October 2019
Table 1: Features of dataset extracted from the SIG venues during 1969–2018
Attribute Name Type of Attribute Count
SIGCOMM IMC CoNext ICN E-Energy SenSys SoSR LANC HotNets ANRW ANCS
Starting Year 1969 2001 2005 2011 2010 2003 2015 2003 2006 2016 2005
Number of Articles Numerical 3480 779 773 210 479 989 121 103 239 60 353
Number [Name] of Authors Numerical [String] 6182 361 357 394 301 334 419 298 337 258 501
Number [Name] of Institutes Numerical [String] 159 121 160 161 161 160 123 83 160 52 160
Number of References Numerical 27407 20314 9737 12146 7163 13907 3369 1764 6272 747 6556
Citations of Articles Numerical 576534 34734 14702 5256 3087 16353 877 282 5071 98 4258
Number [Name] of Participating Countries Numerical [String] 61 40 46 45 39 39 27 17 26 21 31
of our analysis which can be used to observe temporal and spatial
trends in a more interactive manner.
2
We hope that this can be
of benet to the community, and trigger follow-up research into
SIGCOMM’s publication activities.
2 DATA PRELIMINARIES
To perform our analysis, we have used a collection of 7,586 accepted
articles between 1969–2018 from the main proceedings and work-
shops of the agship ACM SIGCOMM conference, as well as other
aliated proceedings of SIGCOMM.
3
For all other venues except
SIGCOMM main proceedings, we exclusively include only main
track papers in our analysis and exclude all poster and demo papers.
Details of the venues are shown in Table 1. This dataset contains all
indexed papers published in SIGCOMM aliated venues obtained
from dierent repositories, including Scopus
4
and the ACM Digital
Library.
5
The dataset contains bibliographic details for each paper, includ-
ing title, keywords, references, publication year, as well as author
aliations. 103 incomplete or irrelevant entries were removed from
the dataset: These entries include messages from editors, entries
without references, and entries without relevant metadata such
as author names, institute names and indexed keywords. Details
of the features extracted from these articles are shown in Table 1.
Among other things, the table shows that each venue has dier-
ent characteristics and longevity. For example, ANRW only has 60
publications and LANC only ran 6 editions between 2001 and 2011.
Hence, our later analysis should be tempered by this observation.
We also gather citation counts using the Scopus digital repository.
We choose Scopus because it contains a reliable, up-to-date and con-
trolled set of citations, rather than open repositories (e.g., Google
Scholar) that crawl citations from any accessible site [9].
Note that the SIGCOMM conference proceedings include many
forms of article, e.g., main track, posters, workshops and Best of
CCR. Therefore, when computing the top ranked entities (e.g., au-
thors, institutes, countries), we manually vet to only count SIG-
COMM main track papers. Other analyses (e.g., Openness to Emerg-
ing Authors) includes authors who have published any forms of
article. That said, although we have taken great care in manually
validating the dataset, we cannot discount minor errors in parsing
the repository entries. This is because they contain a large number
of variations and complexities across the year. As such, we make our
dataset publicly available and welcome further validation eorts.
2
https://charts-sigcomm.herokuapp.com/
3
http://www.sigcomm.org/
4
https://www.scopus.com
5
https://dl.acm.org
Table 2: Top 5 authors in SIGCOMM venues (1969–2018). If
a position is taken by multiple authors, we list them all.
Venue Top Author
SIGCOMM
Scott Shenker, Dina Katabi, Ion Stoica, Jennifer Rexford, Nick Feamster, George Varghese
IMC
Vern Paxson, Anja Feldmann, Paul Barford, Konstantina Papagiannaki, Christo Wilson, Nick Feamster
CoNext
Jennifer Rexford, Christophe Diot, Konstantina Papagiannaki, Olivier Bonaventure, Domenico Giustiniano
ICN
Lixia Zhang, Luca Muscariello, Thomas C. Schmidt, Toru Hasegawa, Dario Rossi, Matthias Waehlisch,
Giovanna Caroglio
E-Energy
Srinivasan Keshav, Hermann de Meer, Sid Chi-Kin Chau, Vijay Arya, Krithi Ramamritham, Catherine Rosenberg
SenSys
Tian He, Prabal Dutta, John A. Stankovic, Mani B. Srivastava, Philip Levis, David E. Culler
SoSR
Jennifer Rexford, Laurent Vanbever, Robert Soulé, Theophilus Benson, Nate Foster, Nick Feamster,
Changhoon Kim
LANC
Eduardo Cerqueira, Benjamín Barán, Pablo Belzarena, Antonio Jorge Gomes Abelém, Denis do Rosário,
Héctor Cancela, Eduardo Grampín
HotNets
Scott Shenker, Hari Balakrishnan, Vyas Sekar, Aditya Akella, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Jennifer Rexford
ANRW
Georg Carle, Brian Trammell, Marco Chiesa, Marco Canini, Benoit Donnet, Mirja Kühlewind
ANCS
Patrick Crowley, Tilman Wolf, Laxmi N. Bhuyan, Bin Liu, Bill Lin, Jun Li, Andrew W. Moore, Jan Korenek
3 RESULTS AND FINDINGS
We now explore several features of our bibliometric dataset. We
intentionally provide a broad brush overview of publication trends,
and make our data publicly available for other researchers wishing
to focus on any particular theme covered.
3.1 An Author Perspective
We begin by exploring trends pertaining to authors who regularly
published in SIGCOMM aliated events.
Author Paper Count.
We rst compute the top authors across
each venue in an attempt to identify key players within the com-
munity. op author analysis for authors with most publications is
manually vetted to include only authors for SIGCOMM main track
papers. Say that the other analysis includes authors who have pub-
lished any forms of article in the SIGCOMM conference, including
Best of CCR papers, posters and workshops. Figure 1 presents the au-
thors with the most publications across all venues. Unsurprisingly,
a number of extremely prominent researchers can be observed in
this top list. We see that the SIGCOMM main conference is promi-
nent across all of these top authors, followed by HotNets, IMC, and
CoNEXT. We also observe more specialist conferences dominating
certain author’s records; for example, Tian He has a signicant
number of publications in SenSys. Note that the size and longevity
of each venue has a major impact on these results.
To give greater insight into the most prominent authors on a per-
conference basis, Table 2 shows the top authors based on publication
count in each of the major venue under the SIGCOMM banner. From
Table 2 we observe that some of the authors are performing equally
well in multiple top venues, e.g., Scott Shenker and Jennifer Rexford
are categorized as the top authors in both SIGCOMM and HotNets,
and CoNext and SoS,R respectively. Further, both are the overall
top two most published author across all venues.
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 49 Issue 5, October 2019
Figure 1: Top authors based on publication count during
1969–2018 in all SIGCOMM venues mentioned in our dataset.
The flagship SIGCOMM conference dominates, but authors
tend to have a mix of publications.
Figure 2: Most cited authors in SIGCOMM venues during
1969–2018, as dened by citation count. The majority of ci-
tations are accumulated from the flagship SIGCOMM confer-
ence papers
Author Citation Rates.
Of course, paper count alone does not
necessarily provide insight into impact. Although a coarse measure,
we turn to citation rates as a proxy of academic impact. Figure 2
shows the authors with the highest citation counts across their SIG-
COMM sponsored publications. Interestingly, whereas Figure 2 re-
veals that many top authors publish in a number of venues, Figure 2
shows that the majority of citations come from papers published in
the SIGCOMM main conference, followed by IMC. This highlights
the importance of the SIGCOMM agship conference, but also the
importance of measurement research.
1969
1976
1983
1990
1997
2004
2011
2018
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
SIGCOMM
IMC
CoNext
ICN
E-Energy
SenSys
SoSR
LANC
HotNets
ANRW
ANCS
Figure 3: Median number of authors during 1969–2018 in
SIGCOMM venues. Collaborative authorship is becoming
more popular over time.
Author Collaboration.
A potential reason for the high productiv-
ity of certain authors is their ability to put together strong teams of
collaborators. Hence, we proceed to explore the collaboration rates
among well published authors. To begin, Figure 3 briey presents
the median number of authors in each year of SIGCOMM aliated
venues during 1969–2018. As expected, this shows that collabora-
tive authorship trends are increasing across all venues. Whereas in
the early years of SIGCOMM, papers tended to be authored by two
people, it is now common to exceed four.
Of course, co-authorship counts alone are not sucient to shed
light on true collaborative practices, as it is also important to under-
stand who collaborates. Figure 4 presents the co-authorship graph
for all authors across SIGCOMM venues. To identify communi-
ties of collaborative networks, we compute modularity and colour
nodes based on which cluster they belong to. We observe six major
communities in the graph, although only four of them contain large
numbers of top published authors. These groups are dominated by
authors from universities such as UC Berkeley, MIT, USC, UCSD,
and Princeton, which highlights the dominant role that US univer-
sities have historically played within the SIGCOMM community.
For example, top authors like Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford and
Scott Shenker have signicantly co-authored articles. Similarly, Jia
Wang and Soumya Sen have co-authored many papers. Of course,
this in itself is not a novel observation, yet we argue it is useful to
visualize these patterns.
As well as these dense clusters of collaborators, we also observe
authors who interconnect the wider community; these are mani-
fested as “bridges” or highly central nodes that connect important
people within the co-authorship graph. To explore this, we compute
the Eigenvector centrality [
10
] of all authors; Table 3 shows those
with the highest values. There is a clear set of highly important
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 49 Issue 5, October 2019
Figure 4: Co-authorship network in SIGCOMM. Node size
indicates the number of links with other nodes in the co-
authorship network and the node color represents cluster
membership. Authors tend to form into collaborative com-
munities.
Table 3: Top authors with highest values of centrality in sev-
eral leading venues sponsored by SIGCOMM
Venue Top 5 Most Central Authors
SIGCOMM
Amin Vahdat, Scott Shenker, Jennifer Rexford,
Yongguang Zhang, Ethan Katz-Bassett
IMC
Vern Paxson, Christo Wilson, Lixia Zhang,
Anja Feldmann, David Chones
CoNext
Jon Crowcroft, Jennifer Rexford, Konstantina Papagiannaki,
Yongguang Zhang, Chuanxiong Guo
ICN
Lixia Zhang, Alexander Afanasyev, Luca Muscariello,
Je Burke, Beichuan Zhang
E-Energy
Vijay Arya, Deva P. Seetharam, Vikas Chandan,
Tanuja Ganu, Harshad Khadilkar
SenSys
John Stankovic, Yongguang Zhang, Tarek Abdelzaher,
Lixia Zhang, David Culler
SoSR
Nate Foster, Chang Kim, Jennifer Rexford,
Robert Soule, Theo Jepsen
LANC
Eduardo Cerqueira, Augusto Neto, Antonio Abelem,
Adalberto Melo, Denis do Rosario
HotNets
Srinivasan Seshan, Aditya Akella, Scott Shenker,
Mohammad Alizadeh, Jennifer Rexford
ANRW
Godred Fairhurst, Felix Weinrank, Anna Brunstrom,
Per Hurtig, Michael Tüxen
ANCS
Patrick Crowley, Michela Becchi, Jonathan Turner,
John D. DeHart, Shakir James
“bridge” nodes; for example, in the SIGCOMM main conference,
Amin Vahdat emerges as the most central author (whereas Scott
Shenker has the highest publication count). Similarly, in CoNext,
E-Energy, SenSys, and ANRW, Jon Crowcroft, Deva P. Seetharam,
John Stankovic, and Godred (Gorry) Fairhurst emerge as key cen-
tral nodes. These authors naturally play a vital role in the wider
community.
Openness to Emerging Authors.
From the above analysis it is
evident that SIGCOMM sponsored events attract attention from
signicant researchers in the eld. Hence, we posit that it may
be dicult for new emerging scholars to publish in such venues.
Indeed, anecdotally, this is often claimed. To identify emerging
authors, we extract all papers with:
(i )
authors who have never
published in the venue before; and
(ii)
authors who do not have
any co-authors who have already published in the venue. Table 4
shows the distribution of emerging authors in SIGCOMM confer-
ences during 1969–2018. Indeed, the majority of papers do contain
Figure 5: Rank of countries in SIGCOMM venues based on
their publication count by emerging authors. There are sig-
nicant numbers of global emerging authors, although the
US still dominates in this regard.
authors who have previously published at the venue. Co-located
workshops appear to play a critical role in providing opportunities
to aspiring authors though. At the SIGCOMM agship conference,
72.7% of emerging authors publish their manuscripts in SIGCOMM
workshops,
6
leaving just 27.3% publishing in the main track. This
suggests that, although it is feasible for new authors to access the
SIGCOMM community more generally, it is much less regular to
get papers published in the main track. It further highlights the
importance of co-located workshops in opening the community
to new entrants. Finally, Figure 5 presents the geo-distribution of
these emerging authors. The US is ranked rst in terms of new au-
thors in SIGCOMM. Canada, China, UK, Germany, France also have
top positions. This perhaps suggests that steps should be taken to
better support new emerging authors coming from non-traditional
academic powerhouses.
6
In the ACM repository and Scopus, 58 SIGCOMM workshops are indexed (besides
main proceedings)
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 49 Issue 5, October 2019
Table 4: The distribution of emerging authors in SIGCOMM
conference proceedings, workshops, and other SIGCOMM
venues. Workshop proceedings are more open towards new au-
thors as compared to main proceedings.
Venue Sub-Venue
Percentage of
New Authors
Percentage of Papers
Published by New Authors
SIGCOMM
Main Proceedings 4.5 10.7
Workshops 16.1 13.6
IMC Main Proceedings 12.5 13.1
CoNext Main Proceedings 14.2 15.9
ICN Main Proceedings 17.3 23.8
E-Energy Main Proceedings 12.1 17.2
SenSys Main Proceedings 11.8 16.9
SoSR Main Proceedings 12.8 19.8
LANC Main Proceedings 15.9 21.3
HotNets Main Proceedings 10.6 21.9
ANRW Main Proceedings 14.7 22.7
ANCS Main Proceedings 9.6 18.4
3.2 A Country Perspective
The above suggests that the country of origin may have an impact
on an author’s success. We next aggregate authors into their re-
spective countries (as measured by home aliations), and inspect
country-based publishing trends.
Country Paper Count.
Figure 6 presents the distribution of pub-
lished articles across all conferences sponsored by SIGCOMM using
a global heat map. As expected, the United States is in the highest
position in terms of publication count. Other top countries include
Canada, China, France, and the UK.
Figure 6: Publication count rank of dierent countries in
SIGCOMM (the numbers represent the ranks). The US, China
and Western European countries have published the largest
number of papers.
Country Ranking.
We proceed to compile a rudimentary ranking
for each country, in terms of its productivity. Rather than solely
relying on publication counts, we also include citation rates (taken
from Scopus). The Normalized Rank Score (NRS) for each country
can be calculated by using Equation 1 where P is publication count,
C is citation count, hi is h-index of a country,
P
top
is maximum
publication count,
C
top
is maximum citation count and
hi
top
is
maximum h-index obtained by a country in a venue. We use h-
index to avoid problems with raw or average citation counts [
11
].
Note that the h-index, mentioned here, is computed based on the
publications and citations of a country in this paper’s dataset.
N RS =
1
3
∗
P
P
top
+
C
C
top
+
hi
hi
top
(1)
United States
United Kingdom
Germany
China
France
Canada
Switzerland
Italy
Australia
Japan
Belgium
India
Spain
Brazil
South Korea
Finland
Sweden
Netherlands
Hong Kong
Israel
Austria
Hungary
Greece
Taiwan
New Zealand
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
Figure 7: Rank of countries in SIGCOMM venues based on
their publication count, citation count, and h-index. The US
is by far the top country by this measure.
Figure 7 shows the ranking of countries, based on their scores.
The US is ranked top across SIGCOMM venues during 1969–2018,
with the UK, Germany, and China taking the subsequent positions.
Although not depicted, we see that certain countries have been mak-
ing dramatic improvements in their rankings too. For instance, both
India and Brazil have increased their rankings by 3 and 5 positions
over the last 10 years. India and Brazil are currently at the 12
th
and
14
th
positions in overall SIGCOMM venues based on productivity
score (up from 15
th
and 19
th
, respectively). Whereas in Brazil this
is primarily driven by LANC, India has also performed very well
across multiple SIGCOMM venues. The former perhaps shows the
importance of regional conferences in engaging countries.
3.3 An Institution Perspective
Although the previous section has explored authors on a regional
basis, often individual countries contain a wide range of institutes.
Therefore, we now aggregate authors by their home institutes and
investigate the trends.
Institute Paper Count.
Figure 8 shows the top institutes based on
publication counts in SIGCOMM venues. We observe a clear domi-
nance by a small set of major players. Most notably, prestigious US
universities dominate the rankings; furthermore, universities from
the UK, China, and Germany play a prominent role. We also note
that research-based institutes have shown an impressive perfor-
mance. For instance, AT&T Labs actually has had the most success
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 49 Issue 5, October 2019
