The Shape of Code

Today is the start of the 2023 International Conference on Software Engineering (the 45’th ICSE, pronounced ick-see), the top ranked software systems conference and publication venue; this is where every academic researcher in the field wants to have their papers appear. This is a bumper year, of the 796 papers submitted 209 were accepted (26%; all numbers a lot higher than previous years), and there are 3,821 people listed as speaking/committee member/chairing session. There are also nine co-hosted conferences (i.e., same time/place) and twenty-two co-hosted workshops.

For new/niche conferences, the benefit of being co-hosted with a much larger conference is attracting more speakers/attendees. For instance, the International Conference on Technical Debt has been running long enough for the organizers to know how hard it is to fill a two-day program. The submission deadline for TechDebt 2023 papers was 23 January, six-weeks after researchers found out whether their paper had been accepted at ICSE, i.e., long enough to rework and submit a paper not accepted at ICSE.

Software research differs from research in many other fields in that papers published in major conferences have a greater or equal status compared to papers published in most software journals.

The advantage that conferences have over journals is a shorter waiting time between submitting a paper, receiving the acceptance decision, and accepted papers appearing in print. For ICSE 2023 the yes/no acceptance decision wait was 3-months, with publication occurring 5-months later; a total of 8-months. For smaller conferences, the time-intervals can be shorter. With journals, it can take longer than 8-months to hear about acceptance, which might only be tentative, with one or more iterations of referee comments/corrections before a paper is finally accepted, and then a long delay before publication. Established academics always have a story to tell about the time and effort needed to get one particular paper published.

In a fast changing field, ‘rapid’ publication is needed. The downside of having only a few months to decide which papers to accept, is that there is not enough time to properly peer-review papers (even assuming that knowledgable reviewers are available). Brief peer-review is not a concern when conference papers are refined to eventually become journal papers, but researchers’ time is often more ‘productively’ spent writing the next conference paper (productive in the sense of papers published per unit of effort), this is particularly true given that work invested in a journal publication does not automatically have the benefit of greater status.

The downside of rapid publication without follow-up journal publication, is the proliferation of low quality papers, and a faster fashion cycle for research topics (novelty is an important criterion for judging the worthiness of submitted papers).

Conference attendance costs (e.g., registration fee+hotel+travel+etc) can be many thousands of pounds/dollars, and many universities/departments will only fund those who to need to attend to present a paper. Depending on employment status, the registration fee for just ICSE is $1k+, with fees for each co-located events sometimes approaching $1k.

Conferences have ‘solved’ this speaker only funding issue by increasing the opportunities to present a paper, by, for instance, sessions for short 7-minute talks, PhD students, and even undergraduates (which also aids the selection of those with an aptitude for the publish or perish treadmill).

The main attraction of attending a conference is the networking opportunities it provides. Sometimes the only people at a session are the speakers and their friends. Researchers on short-term contracts will be chatting to Principle Investigators whose grant applications were recently approved. Others will be chatting to existing or potential collaborators; and there is always lots of socialising. ICSE even offers childcare for those who can afford to fly their children to Australia, and the locals.

There is an industrial track, but these are often treated as second class citizens, e.g., if a schedule clash occurs they will be moved or cancelled. There is even a software engineering in practice track. Are the papers on other tracks expected to be unconnected with software engineering practice, or is this an academic rebranding of work related to industry? While academics offer lip-service to industrial relevance, connections with industry are treated as a sign of low status.

In general, for people working in industry, I don’t think it’s worth attending an academic conference. Larger companies treat conferences as staff recruiting opportunities.

Are people working in industry more likely to read conference papers than journal papers? Are people working in industry more likely to read ICSE papers than papers appearing at other conferences?

My book Evidence Based Software Engineering cites 2,035 papers, and is a sample of one, of people working in industry. The following table shows the percentage of papers appearing in each kind of publication venue (code+data):

    Published          %
    Journal           42
    Conference        18
    Technical Report  13
    Book              11
    Phd Thesis         3
    Masters Thesis     2
    In Collection      2
    Unpublished        2
    Misc               2

The 450 conference papers appeared at 285 different conferences, with 26% of papers appearing at the top ten conferences. The 871 journal papers appeared in 389 different journals, with 24% of the papers appearing in the top ten journals.

Count Conference
 
27  International Conference on Software Engineering
15  International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
14  European Software Engineering Conference
13  Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
10  International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
 8  International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
 8  International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
 8  International Conference on Software Maintenance
 7  International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering
 7  International Conference on Program Comprehension
 
Count Journal
 
28  Transactions on Software Engineering 
27  Empirical Software Engineering
25  Psychological Review
21  PLoS ONE
19  The Journal of Systems and Software
18  Communications of the ACM 
17  Cognitive Psychology
15  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition
14  Memory & Cognition
13  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
13  Psychological Bulletin

Transactions on Software Engineering has the highest impact factor of any publication in the field, and it and The Journal of Systems and Software rank second and third on the h5-index, with ICSE ranked first (in the field of software systems).

After scanning paper titles, and searching for pdfs, I have a to-study collection of around 20 papers and 10 associated datasets from this year’s ICSE+co-hosted.