Artificial Intelligence in Perspective: A Retrospective on Fifty Volumes of the Artificial Intelligence Journal

When the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ) put out its fiftieth volume in 1991, it seemed an appropriate time to look at the field through the perspective of the publication of the journal. The growth from one volume of 300 pages in 1970 to six volumes of almost 2400 pages in 1991 reflects the academic growth of the field. The fifty volumes include almost six hundred published papers. To capture the intellectual highlights of the AIJ publication history, we decided to look at what has happened to ideas published in some of the most influential papers from the journal. As a measure of influence, we used references from other papers as determined from SCI's databases, the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index. We obtained from each index a list of the fifty AIJ papers that were most cited in the five years following their publication. There was significant overlap between the two lists, and the combined bibliography of sixty-nine items is appended to this introduction. About thirty of the papers in this bibliography had twenty-five or more citations. The authors of these highly cited papers were asked to write a short essay looking at their original work from their current perspective. We suggested that they might respond to some or all of the following questions: