Are program committee members cited differently?
Citation patterns around PC service in programming languages conferences
This project asks whether researchers are cited differently around the years when they serve on a program committee (PC).
We build a researcher-conference-year panel that connects PC members, accepted papers, and OpenAlex data for selected programming languages conferences. Our results are descriptive: citation changes are small and uneven in the broader sample, but clearer for researchers with no earlier same conference service evidence. In that subset, citations to PC members' earlier work rise around the service year and then partly fade, while the serving conference's citation share increases by about 9.2 percentage points before softening after the service year. These patterns suggest citation movement around PC service, but not a causal effect.
2017–2025 · ICFP, POPL, OOPSLA & PLDI
952 researchers · ~2.5K papers · 110K citation links · 37K observations
Topics Peer review · Bibliometrics · Computational social science · Event study · Web scraping
Data sources OpenAlex · Public program committee lists · Conference proceedings
Early explorations
I first explored ICFP and POPL interactively to see what patterns were worth investigating. These early visualizations helped shape the analysis in the final report.
