How healthy are software engineering conferences?

Abstract

In this article we study the health of software engineering conferences by means of a suite of metrics created for this purpose. The metrics measure stability of the community, openness to new authors, introversion, representativeness of the PC with respect to the authors' community, availability of PC candidates, and scientific prestige. Using this metrics suite, we assess the health of 11 software engineering conferences over a period of more than 10 years. In general, our findings suggest that software engineering conferences are healthy, but we observe important differences between conferences with a wide scope and those with a more narrow scope. We also find that depending on the chosen health metric, some conferences perform better than others. This knowledge may be used by prospective authors to decide in which conferences to publish, and by conference steering committees or PC chairs to assess their selection process.

How practitioners perceive the relevance of software engineering research

“…Areas that were identified as part of the project included modern programming languages, software configuration management, and inspections. In addition to impact, other "health" aspects of software engineering research have been analyzed such as the health of conferences [2] or novel peer review models [3]. The question of impact and relevance of software engineering research has been raised by practitioners in industry, funding organizations, and researchers themselves.…”

Human aspects, gamification, and social media in collaborative software engineering

“…Third, this work has led to numerous methodological improvements (outlined below) benefiting the empirical software engineering community, or any other researchers analysing trace data. These techniques are also applicable to other domains, as we have shown, e.g., in the metastudy of the "health" of software engineering conferences [35,36].…”

Finding Trends in Software Research

“…Multiple bibliometric based studies have explored patterns in SE venues over the last decades. Some authors have explored only conferences [43], [51] or journals [22] independently while some authors have explored a mixture of both [7], [11], [35].…”