Program Committee Service and Citations
Studying citation patterns around program committee service in major programming-languages conferences.
Research project in Data Science · Supervised by Clément Pit-Claudel, SYSTEMF, EPFLreport code
The setup
The question
Are researchers cited differently around the years when they serve on a program committee (PC)?
Data
A researcher–conference–year panel connects PC members, accepted papers, and OpenAlex citation data.
- 2017–2025 across ICFP, POPL, OOPSLA, and PLDI
- 952 researchers
- ~2.5K accepted papers
- 110K citation links
- 37K researcher–conference–year observations
What we found
- In the no-earlier-service sample, the serving conference’s citation share rose by about 9.2 percentage points in the PC year.
- Citations to earlier work also rose around the PC year, then softened afterward.
- In the full sample, citation changes were smaller and less consistent across conferences.
- These patterns are descriptive, not causal.
Exploration
- Built interactive explorers for ICFP and POPL to inspect researcher-level citation patterns.
- Used the early visualizations to identify which patterns were worth investigating further.
- Carried the most relevant patterns into the final event-study and citation-source analyses.