Assessment of institutions, scholars, and contributions on agile software development (2001–2012)

• We identified 221 studies on agile software development have drawn 466 researchers and published in 38 SCI-indexed journals from 37 states.
• We measure individual and institutional contributions through literature appearances in article count and citation analysis.
• JSS, IST, ESE, and SPE published relatively more articles on agile software development from 2007 to 2012, within identified 38 SCI-indexed journals. But cannot find the journal basket for agile software development as of now.
• We found a group of active core intelligence with significant appearances in and dominant influence on agile software development.
• We presented a new steam of research that focuses on hybrid agile to scale up to handle larger projects and distributed teams and to scale out to manage variability across the product families.

The number of scholarly publications on agile software development has grown significantly in recent years. Several researchers reviewed and attempted to synthesize studies on agile software development. However, no work has ranked the contributions of scholars and institutions to publications using a thorough process. This study presents findings on top publications, institutions, and scholars in the agile software development field from 2001 to 2012 based on the publication of such works in Science Citation Index journals. This paper highlights the key outlets for agile research and summarizes the most influential researchers and institutions as well as the most studied research areas. This study concludes by providing directions for future research.