Proposed maturity assessment framework for a research field

In recent years, an increasing number of papers have been published that analyze the literature of a research field to determine its main contributors, topics, and perspectives. These works apply approaches such as systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis to describe various characteristics of a given field which are considered in the development of future research. One of these characteristics, the notion of research field maturity, has been mentioned in many works but has not yet been formalized resulting in a lack of consensus concerning the definition and analysis techniques. The inclusion of a maturity assessment could lend new insights to how to position future research in order to maximize its contribution and to legitimize the literature and the works created from it. This paper defines the maturity of a research field and discusses its assessment based on three main criteria: authorship (who the primary authors are and the relationships between them), breadth of methods (the variety of research methods used), and academic/practitioner relationship (to what extent the results of research are successfully being applied). A framework using these criteria for the maturity assessment of a research field is proposed. Part of this maturity framework is pilot tested using the enterprise engineering research field.