Dr. Alan Turing (1912-1954), A Founding Visionary in The Evolution of Modern Artificial Intelligence: A Scientometric Analysis

Aim

Alan Mathison Turing, widely known as Alan Turing, was a British mathematician, logician, and computer scientist, recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even after seven decades since his death, his contributions to Al continue to shape various aspects of our daily lives, raising concerns about their impact on the future. This study provides an analysis of Turing’s 74 contributions, of which 43 were published during his active and productive life (from 1935 to 1954) and 31 were posthumous publications (from 1956 to 2020).

Background

Today’s Al is having huge impact on modern society and Alan Turing is one of its founders. This episode begins with him through a bibliometric study and endeavor to draw a scientific portrait of this fame of computer scientist.

Materials and Methods

Bibliographical and biographical data of Alan Turing were collected from Google Scholar (GS), Research Gate (RG), bibliography and some classic documents containing publications of Alan Turning. Collected data has been analyzed using standard bibliometric methods for generating scientific portrait.

Results

Turing’s first paper was published in 1935 when he was just 24 years old. The highest number of his publications i.e. five papers appeared in 1951 when he was 36. Throughout his career, he collaborated with 23 co-authors on 74 publications. However, the majority of his work, 61 contributions, was non-collaborative, with only 13 being collaborative in nature. His active life spanned only 43 years, and during this time, he published the greatest number of papers i.e. 24 within the decade of 1945-1954 while 19 papers were published in the preceding decade (1935-1944). His most frequent collaborator was M. H. A. Newman, with whom he co-authored three publications. The majority of Turing’s publications (14, or 32.56%) were journal articles during his active life. Of his posthumous publications, 12 (38.71%) were in the form of composite books. His most frequent journals for publication included Journal of Symbolic Logic (5 papers), Cryptologia (3 papers), and Annals of Mathematics (2 papers). Finally, the study examines the validity of Bradford’s law, and the overall DC value calculated to be 0.16.

Conclusion

Alan’s intellectual journey, though it lasted only 43 years, was filled with groundbreaking publications, many of which are still relevant today. It is a high time to quantitively asses the contributions of this scientist and this is an important and original work.