Thirty Years of NIK: A Bibliometric Study of Paper Impact and Changes in Publication Patterns

Abstract

The Norwegian Annual Informatics Conference (NIK) has served as the most important national meeting point for the academic community in Norway during the last thirty years. National conferences often have a reputation of being of lesser quality than international conferences. Yet, NIK have practiced peer review with relatively low acceptance rates which is a trait of quality. Based on the assumption that quality and impact are related, this study set out to explore the actual impact of NIK in terms of citations over its thirty-year lifetime. As NIK is not being systematically indexed there are no readily available source of citation data and these were thus manually extracted. The results show that NIK papers do get cited at a level comparable to reputable international conferences, and the ratio of papers that are cited is increasing. The results also show that the title length and the number of authors per paper have increased, whereas papers written in Norwegian do not get cited.