Communications - May 2012

directly to their readers through such words as “you” (+222%) and “your” (+205%). Interesting to note is while the content of Communications became more scientific and technical, it was presented in a way that was less scientific and technical. A possible effect of this change is that the content of Communications became more accessible to a wider, more diverse audience. We, too, found ourselves adopting this more personal style when writing this article.

Our n-gram analysis also revealed changes in Communications’ use of gender-related terms from 2000 to 2010. On average, masculine pronouns (such as “he,” “his,” and “him”) appeared 277% more often than feminine pronouns (such as “she,” “hers,” and “her”). Moreover, the gap widened from 190% in 2000 to more than 290% in 2010. One possible explanation is the gender gap between male and female computing professionals also grew and was wider in 2010 than it was at any time in the previous 25 years. 14

systems Development Life Cycle
The systems development life cycle
(SDLC) is one of the most ubiquitous
and enduring components of the com-
puting profession. With respect to the
four principal phases of SDLC—plan-
ning, analysis, design, and implemen-
tation—industry standards generally
recommend that approximately 15% of
time and resources budgeted for a sys-
tems development project go to plan-
ning, 20% to analysis, 35% to design,
and 30% to implementation. 9 To what
extent, then, does discussion of them
in Communications mirror the level
of interest recommended by industry
standards? To answer, we again turned
to n-gram analysis to compute the aver-
age frequency with which each SDLC
phase was mentioned in Communica-
tions from 2000 to 2010. Dividing the
value for each phase by the overall sum
of the average frequencies yielded the
relative average frequencies for Com-
munications in Table 2.

figure 2. Communications’ changing focus.

science and technology terms business and management terms

World events

When major events occur somewhere in the world, how and to what extent does Communications respond? Do such events influence the computing profession? To answer, we conducted an n-gram analysis that included three types of world events: a natural disaster (Hurricane Katrina), a terrorist attack (9/11), and a health crisis (2003 SARS outbreak); Figure 3 shows a common pattern with respect to how Communications reacted to such events. Specifically, a major world event would first appear in Communications shortly after it occured, with discussion of the event—measured by how often it was mentioned—growing quickly for a short time thereafter. This finding indicates Communications is not insulated from major world events but rather embraces them and actively contributes to their discussion in the global forum. After a few years, however, Communications’ interest in a major event would decline sharply. Nevertheless, even after experiencing this precipitous drop, major world events still tend to be mentioned occasionally in Communications over the following years.