  Although the computer science community successfully harnessed exponential
increases in computer performance to drive societal and economic change, the
exponential growth in publications is proving harder to accommodate. To gain a
deeper understanding of publication growth and inform how the computer science
community should handle this growth, we analyzed publication practices from
several perspectives: ACM sponsored publications in the ACM Digital Library as
a whole: subdisciplines captured by ACM's Special Interest Groups (SIGs); ten
top conferences; institutions; four top U.S. departments; authors; faculty; and
PhDs between 1990 and 2012. ACM publishes a large fraction of all computer
science research. We first summarize how we believe our main findings inform
(1) expectations on publication growth, (2) how to distinguish research quality
from output quantity; and (3) the evaluation of individual researchers. We then
further motivate the study of computer science publication practices and
describe our methodology and results in detail.
