Ranking of institutions active in technical games research

[Julian Togelius]

Mark Nelson has produced a very useful ranking of institutions active
in technical games research. It ranks universities (and other
institutions) based on how much they publish in venus such as CIG,
AIIDE, FDG, Transactions on Games, CHI Play, etc.

http://www.kmjn.org/game-rankings/

In addition to satisfying your curiosity, this kind of list can be
very useful when you need to convince your local bean-counter /
administrator (these kinds of people tend to like rankings) that there
is such a thing as technical games research, and that you deserve
credit for your work within the field.

Also, congrats to the UC Santa Cruz people for an almost unassailable
first position!

Julian

--
Julian Togelius
Associate Professor, New York University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
mail: jul...@togelius.com, web: http://julian.togelius.com

[Fabio Zambetta]

Thank you very much Julian for pointing this out and kudos to Mark for the incredible amount of work.

It will be indeed very helpful to me and my PhD students at an institutional level :)

Ciao

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[ahj...@gmail.com]

Mark -- this is excellent work and indeed an incredible effort. Beyond pleasing the bean counters, I think this list is important because of the way the data is compiled and presented. Here is one example.

 In looking at the entire landscape of research, rather than just numbers and institution names, I made an interesting (to me) observation. It is surprising to me that within Computer Science research, where technical games research broadly falls, I find myself in an underrepresented group (Indian origin), at least near the higher end of the list, while it is clearly not the case for our broader field. Even worse are numbers (if any) of Indian institutions. This is probably not a big deal because the group is small at 1148 researchers and I am hoping that this is going to get resolved within the next couple of generations of researchers in a relatively new field.

 I just wanted to say that this data is valuable and if maintained regularly will allow us to better monitor these kind of issues as our community grows.

Thank you!

Arnav

--------------------

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Director, Chancellor's Faculty Excellence Cluster in Visual Narrative

Associate Director, Digital Games Research Initiative

North Carolina State University

[Levi Lelis]

Hi Arnav, maybe India has a local conference on games research that is well attended? Brazil has a conference called SBGames that might have more attendees than CIG and AIIDE combined. 

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[Mark J. Nelson]

Hi Simon & Peter,

Yes, I do plan to keep the affiliations updated. Higher-profile moves
I should see just ambiently, e.g. I assume the QMUL Twitter account
would announce any new staff. But I'm happy to update in response to
emails too. Some kind of community-editable version would be possible,
but might be more tech/maintenance work than it's worth. Somewhere in
between, I could add a webform to make it easy to submit
updates/corrections on the site.

Updates adding new papers in the 16 venues currently included will
happen automatically once a month or so. I get all the data from DBLP,
via the XML dumps they make available <http://dblp.org/xml/>, so once a
proceedings volume or journal issue is in DBLP, it'll end up pulled in
here too.

The R script I use to count/rank things is here:
https://github.com/anadrome/dblp-stats/blob/master/game-rankings/rankings.R

Choosing the 16 venues as representative of "technical games research",
broadly defined, is more subjective. I'm open to adding more. The only
hard requirement is that they have to be indexed in DBLP.

As for Simon's question about citations: alas, I don't have that
data. Google Scholar seems to be the most complete source of citation
data, but they don't let people scrape it at large scale. If there's a
good open-access source of citation data that covers this field, I'd
love to know about it.

Best,
Mark

'Peter Cowling' via Computational Intelligence and Games <cig...@googlegroups.com> writes:

> Really interesting - thanks for this - not least because of York's high
> position :).
>
> Two ideas to take it further (if it is perceived as generally useful) -
> (1) empower the community to continuously update the data (e.g. DOI numbers
> for papers in selected journals/conferences, list of staff employed by your
> University). And
> (2) release the details of your methodology - a useful thing to discuss at
> the CIG games TC.
>
> ... and we are hiring a permanent lecturer/research fellow in game
> AI/ML/Analytics at the #1 University in Europe (#5 in the world :) - see
> https://jobs.york.ac.uk/wd/plsql/wd_portal.show_job?p_web_site_id=3885&p_web_page_id=343216
> .
>
> Best Wishes,
> Peter
>
> Peter Cowling
> Director of IGGI & DC Labs / Professor of Computer Science
> Digital Creativity Labs (DC Labs)
> Ron Cooke Hub, University of York, Heslington YO10 5GE, UK
> peter....@york.ac.uk // www.cowling.org.uk
> Tel.: +44 (1904) 325355
>
> PhD places in games research available Sept 2018 - see www.iggi.org.uk
>
> <http://www.iggi.org.uk>
> <http://digitalcreativity.ac.uk>
> [Email disclaimer <http://www.york.ac.uk/docs/disclaimer/email.htm>]
>
>
> On 15 March 2018 at 12:36, Simon Lucas <simon...@qmul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Hi Mark,
>>
>>
>>
>> Very interesting piece of work: will need to be updated regularly
>>
>> to maintain value.
>>
>>
>>
>> For example, the Game AI Group at Queen Mary University of London
>>
>> is very new (created summer 2017) We are growing rapidly, and
>>
>> appointing some great new people. I hope the list will be updated soon.
>>
>>
>>
>> One more thing: depending on the software you’ve written to help
>>
>> create this, it may be possible without too much extra effort
>>
>> to create another table based on citations.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>>
>>
>> Simon
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Simon Lucas
>>
>> Professor of Artificial Intelligence
>>
>> Head of School
>>
>> Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
>>
>> Queen Mary University of London
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *<cig...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "ahj...@gmail.com" <
>> ahj...@gmail.com>
>> *Reply-To: *"cig...@googlegroups.com" <cig...@googlegroups.com>
>> *Date: *Thursday, 15 March 2018 at 12:27
>> *To: *"procedur...@googlegroups.com" <proceduralcontent@
>> googlegroups.com>
>> *Cc: *cigames <cig...@googlegroups.com>
>> *Subject: *Re: [pcg] Ranking of institutions active in technical games

>> --

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Mark J. Nelson
The MetaMakers Institute
Falmouth University
http://www.kmjn.org

[Mark J. Nelson]

Hi all,

As an occasional follow-up, I thought I'd note that a September 2019
edition is now up:

http://www.kmjn.org/game-rankings/

And the extended list of all 2000+ researchers for whom I have current
affiliation information, at 679 institutions, is here:

http://www.kmjn.org/game-rankings/affiliations.html

The basic methodology hasn't changed: Just a pure paper count. Take it
for what you will, or won't. :-) The changelog gives more details about
specific changes. So far I haven't seen a benefit to moving to other
ways of weighting or normalizing things (I'm not against it per se, but
haven't seen a method that is computable with the data I have, and also
produces an obvious improvement). See also the two paragraphs of
disclaimers at the end of the page, starting with: "Is a simple paper
count useful?"

Comments and caveats:

* I maintain the affiliations mostly manually, due to not having found a
good automated source of this data (DBLP's affiliations are very out
of date). And there are now over 2000 people's affiliations to track!
I rely on people updating their official website, their LinkedIn,
their Twitter bio, etc., or even just emailing me directly, to
determine if they have moved.

* Therefore, if your affiliation is out of date, or missing, reply
(off-list) and let me know what your current affiliation is and I'll
queue it for the next update. This also applies if you have multiple
affiliations and the one I list you under isn't the one you consider
primary. I try to guess intelligently, but if you just tell me your
preferred affiliation, I'm happy to go with that. (Note that this is
current affiliation, not affiliation when the papers were published.)

* If the name you are listed under isn't your preferred or current name,
reply (also off-list) and it's easy for me to correct it ASAP.

* No 2019 conferences are included in the current totals. Although a few
have happened already (COG, FDG), their proceedings are not yet
indexed by DBLP. Some 2019 journal volumes are included however. I
anticipate that a bunch of 2019 conferences will be included in the
next update.

* I apologize that the ICGA Journal is still not included. It's on my
TODO list, but requires getting some additional data. DBLP doesn't
distinguish between which ICGA publications are peer-reviewed research
papers vs. miscellaneous other publications (columns, notes from the
editor, news updates, etc.). The journal website does, though, and I
should be able to scrape this once I get some time to write some
scraping code. Once I do, I'll include the peer-reviewed papers.

As always, don't take things too seriously. Some things are probably
overrated, and some underrated. :-)

-Mark

--
Mark J. Nelson
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
American University, Washington, DC
http://www.kmjn.org