I’ve been playing with Microsoft Academic Entity Analytics. It provides an interesting variety of statistics and views. I looked up “constraint satisfaction problem“. Turns out the “top author” is Berk Hess. If that surprises you, you’ll be even more surprised to learn that Professor Hess achieved this distinction with only three “constraint satisfaction problem” papers. Understanding dawns when we see that the top-cited of the three, with 13,445 citations, is:

GROMACS 4: Algorithms for highly efficient, load-balanced, and scalable molecular simulation
2008 JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL THEORY AND COMPUTATION
Berk Hess, Carsten Kutzner, David van der Spoel, Erik Lindahl

In fact, Hess, Kutzner, van der Spoel and Lindahl are the top four authors listed for “constraint satisfaction problem”. I doubt that the Constraint Programming community has anything to offer here, but it might be worth checking out; could do wonders for your citation count.

So some caution needs to be exercised in viewing these stats, but they are still interesting. Another thing that stood out to me: the total number of “constraint satisfaction problem” publications reached its peak in 2013 with 478, and has declined to 256 in 2020. On the other hand, the number of “constraint optimization problem” publications went from 18 in 2013 to 34 in 2020. And in case you were wondering, the top five authors for “constraint optimization problem” are the authors of this paper (which has 337 citations and actually uses Integer Linear Programming):

Collective Generation of Natural Image Descriptions
2012 MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Polina Kuznetsova, Vicente Ordonez, Alexander Berg, Tamara Berg, Yejin Choi

There are many other ways to play with Microsoft Academic’s stats and graphs. An example. Another example.

Or perhaps you want to use the Microsoft Academic Graph software to create a bespoke tool for the constraints community? An example of the kind of thing that can be done.

And there are many other tools that might be used to produce many types of statistics or visualizations for the constraints community. Perhaps you have additional suggestions — for tools to use or statistics/visualizations that you’d like to see?