Writing Good Software Engineering Research Papers: Revisited

Abstract

With the goal of helping software engineering researchers understand how to improve their papers, Mary Shaw presented Writing Good Software Engineering Research Papers in 2003. Shaw analyzed the abstracts of the papers submitted to the 2002 International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE) to determine trends in research question type, contribution type, and validation approach. We revisit Shaw's work to see how the software engineering research community has evolved since 2002. The goal of this paper is to aid software engineering researchers in understanding trends in research question design, research question type, and validation approach by analyzing the abstracts of the papers submitted to ICSE 2016. We implemented Shaw's recommendation for replicating her study through the use of multiple coders and the calculation of inter-rater reliability and demonstrate that her approach can be repeated. Our results indicate that reviewers have increased expectations that papers have solid evaluations of the research contribution. Additionally, the 2016 results include at least 17% mining software repository (MSR) papers, a category of papers not seen in 2002. The advent of MSR papers has increased the use of generalization/characterization research questions, the production of empirical report contribution, and validation by evaluation.