The Role of China in Requirements Research

Abstract

China was the first country to create gunpowder, the seismograph, the magnetic compass, steel, paper, and the suspension bridge. Yet in the twentieth century, China seemed to take a back seat to the West regarding the invention and exploitations of information technology (IT). This paper shows how China’s role in one area within IT, namely requirements engineering (RE), is dramatically increasing in the past 15 years, and in fact, China has become one of the world’s leaders in this area of research. This paper carefully examines the demographics of the entire corpus of RE publications and shows the roles played by authors from China. It discovers that although the demographics of RE research in Asia are very similar to the rest of the world, wide differences exist between individual Asian nations. Specifically, China’s rate of growth in RE publication production far exceeds any other Asian country.