A STATISTIC REVIEW OF COMPUTER-AIDED PROCESS PLANNING RESEARCH

Since the late 1970's, computer-aided process planning (CAPP) has attracted a large amount of research interest, which has led to a huge volume of literature published on this subject. The literature encompasses both reviews and research articles. The review articles are mostly technologically oriented. This paper takes a different angle to look back the CAPP research, that is, a statistic approach. The paper analyses the journals that have been publishing CAPP research works. The concept of "Subject Strength" of a journal is introduced and used to gauge the level of focus of a journal on a particular research subject/domain, i.e. CAPP. Discussions about the recent CAPP research works are presented in different categories as they fall in. The term "Technology Impact Factor (TIF)" is introduced to assess the level of impact of a particular technology, in terms of citation counts. All discussions and analyses are carried out based on the data gathered from the Elsevier's Scopus abstract and citation database. Finally, a discussion on the future development is presented. The literature suggests that this is the only review article of the similar nature in the first decade of the century.