From Academia to Software Development: Publication Citations in Source Code Comments
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Academic publications have been evaluated with the impact on research communities based on the number of citations. On the other hand, the impact of academic publications on industry has been rarely studied. This paper investigates how academic publications contribute to software development by analyzing publication citations in source code comments in open source software repositories. We propose an automated approach of detecting academic publications based on Named Entity Recognition, and achieve 0.90 in F_1 as detection accuracy. We conduct a large-scale study of publication citations with 319,438,977 comments collected from active 25,925 repositories written in seven programming languages. Our findings indicate that academic publications can be knowledge sources of software development, and there can be potential issues of obsoleting knowledge.
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