  Glass published the first report on the assessment of systems and software
engineering scholars and institutions two decades ago. The ongoing, annual
survey of publications in this field provides fund managers, young scholars,
graduate students, etc. with useful information for different purposes.
However, the studies have been questioned by some critics because of a few
shortcomings of the evaluation method. It is actually very hard to reach a
widely recognized consensus on such an assessment of scholars and institutions.
This paper presents a module and automated method for assessment and trends
analysis in software engineering compared with the prior studies. To achieve a
more reasonable evaluation result, we take into consideration more high-quality
publications, the rank of each publication analyzed, and the different roles of
authors named on each paper in question. According to the 7638 papers published
in 36 publications from 2008 to 2013, the statistics of research subjects
roughly follow power laws, implying the interesting Matthew Effect. We then
identify the Top 20 scholars, institutions and countries or regions in terms of
a new evaluation rule based on the frequently-used one. The top-ranked scholar
is Mark Harman of the University College London, UK, the top-ranked institution
is the University of California, USA, and the top-ranked country is the USA.
Besides, we also show two levels of trend changes based on the EI
classification system and user-defined uncontrolled keywords, as well as
noteworthy scholars and institutions in a specific research area. We believe
that our results would provide a valuable insight for young scholars and
graduate students to seek possible potential collaborators and grasp the
popular research topics in software engineering.
