Where does Software Engineering research funding come from? A bibliometric study in top venues (1975-2023)

Abstract Bibliometric studies that analyze research publications assist in understanding the research area better and can reveal trends and emerging research topics. In the research area of Software Engineering, previous works have analyzed author and country participation, and citations, but funding sources have been examined only on a very limited level. In this work, our objective is to examine funding sources encountered in Software Engineering publications, observing at the same time trends that appear over the years. We provide a bibliometric data analysis on funding in top Software Engineering journals (TSE, EMSE, TOSEM) and top conference venues (ICSE, ASE, ESEC/FSE, ESEM, EASE, ISSRE) in the years since the first publication in each venue and till 2023. For this analysis, we have collected relevant data from Scopus and have extracted funding sources via a combination of automated and manual analysis. Among the 20,397 publications analyzed, 1,099 different funding bodies were found. Our results show that funding comes mainly from countries that devote a large amount of their budget on R&D activities (United States, China, Canada), although in recent years there is more diversity in country participation. Also funded publications have increased considerably in the last years. Our work can provide the possibility to see how funding on agency and country level is reflected in Software Engineering publications.