Happy Birthday! A trend analysis on past MSR papers

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the MSR conference, it is a worthwhile exercise to meditate on the past, present and future of our research discipline. Indeed, since the MSR community has experienced a big influx of researchers bringing in new ideas, state-of-the art technology and contemporary research methods it is unclear what the future might bring. In this paper, we report on a text mining exercise applied on the complete corpus of MSR papers to reflect on where we come from; where we are now; and where we should be going. We address issues like the trendy (and outdated) research topics; the frequently (and less frequently) cited cases; the popular (and emerging) mining infrastructure; and finally the proclaimed actionable information which we are deemed to uncover.