Communications of the ACM
Structural Challenges and the Need to Adapt
Credit: Zhang Xiangyang
At key junctures in the course of a field's evolution adjustments may be needed to stimulate and sustain rich, vital scholarship. In this Viewpoint, I will argue that the field of computing and information research is at just such a juncture and that structural changes are needed to ensure the field's ongoing health. Recently, Communications contributors and others have engaged in a discussion around issues related to the publication culture in computing research and its effects on the field.1,3,6 That discussion responds in part to a shift in the late 1990s within the main computing archival publication format away from journal publications with variable-page lengths, rolling submissions, and multiple review cycles to conference proceedings with typically 10–15 page limits, set deadlines, and minimal review cycles.4 Here, I seek to broaden the conversation to one that foregrounds the question: How do we—as a field and as individual researchers—create robust new scientific and engineering knowledge? Related conversations that concern depth and rigor of scholarship, individual career trajectories, publication, authorship norms, reporting of primary data and results, creation and deployment of artifacts, evaluation criteria, and others, follow from this central question.
To place my comments in perspective, step back to consider a few general observations about the development of any young field in relation to the development of the intellectual lifespans of individual scholars within that field. A new field by definition emerges and takes shape out of one or more existing fields.a At the onset, there are likely a host of new research questions and opportunities. Early in a field's history, there may be relatively little prior work to build directly upon; and more work is likely to be the first of its kind. The first scholars in an emerging field, even as they seek to create the early canonical work, often bring an interdisciplinary orientation to their thought. In such cases, they came from and were trained in other fields and bring diverse ways of asking scientific questions and doing scientific work. Over time the infusion of interdisciplinary perspectives can dissipate as those who created the field build the first departments, train the next generation of researchers, and award Ph.D.'s to inddividuals who, in turn, train the second generation of young researchers, and so on. The movement often tends away from an interdisciplinary orientation and toward developing the new field's distinctive culture and norms.
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