Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research
Paul Ralph, Nauman bin Ali, Sebastian Baltes, Domenico Bianculli,, Jessica Diaz, Yvonne Dittrich, Neil Ernst, Michael Felderer, Robert Feldt,, Antonio Filieri, Breno Bernard Nicolau de Fran\c{c}a, Carlo Alberto Furia,, Greg Gay, Nicolas Gold, Daniel Graziotin, Pinjia He
TL;DR
This paper discusses the development of empirical standards for software engineering research to enhance research quality, peer review fairness, and adapt to evolving community consensus.
Contribution
It introduces living empirical standards for common research methods in software engineering, aiming to improve research practices and peer review processes.
Findings
Standards are designed to be continuously revised and updated.
Standards aim to improve research quality and peer review fairness.
Implementation of standards can lead to more reliable and transparent research.
Abstract
Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific community's expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical standards for research methods commonly used in software engineering. These living documents, which should be continuously revised to reflect evolving consensus around research best practices, will improve research quality and make peer review more effective, reliable, transparent and fair.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Scientific Computing and Data Management · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices