How fast is research advancing?

In the IT industry, everything is moving at a fast pace. New products and services are released daily. So it would follow that computer science research is moving at a similair breakneck speed? Not so according to a recent bibliometric survey published in the communications of the ACM. The “half-life” of computer science research is 7,5 years compared to an average across a set of scientific disciplines of 7,7 year – which by the way is the half-life of the software engineering discipline.

In fact, the author notes, many of the grand challenges of computer science are as daunting today as they were 20 years ago.