3rd International Workshop on Methodological Issues with Empirical Studies in Software EngineeringWSESE 2026

With the steep increase in empirical studies and the advent of secondary studies that aggregate their results, a main concern is their quality. Although researchers have raised concerns about various quality issues for many years, many of these issues persist, partially due to the complexity of empirical studies in our field—whether human subjects are involved or not. Problems related to appropriate design and the correct usage of statistical methods are crucial for the reliability of the results. Consequently, as a community, we need to better understand these issues and how to mitigate, if not eliminate, them. The workshop’s aim is to increase awareness of the importance of quality and appropriateness in the methods applied during the different stages of software engineering empirical studies to yield reliable results and to disseminate this knowledge to the broader SE community.

Accepted Papers

The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the workshop.

	Title
	A Community Roadmap for Meta-Research and Knowledge Transfer in Software EngineeringExperience Report / Work-in-Progress WSESE Angelika Kaplan, Martin Armbruster, Jan Bernoth, Marco Konersmann, Jan Keim, Ralf Reussner
	An Investigation on How AI-Generated Responses Affect Software Engineering SurveysTechnical Paper WSESE Ronnie de Souza Santos, Italo Santos, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Cleyton Magalhaes, Mairieli Wessel Pre-print
	A Sustainable Data Extraction Documentation Process for Literature StudiesTechnical Paper WSESE Angelika Kaplan, Marco Konersmann, Thomas Kühn, Raffaela Mirandola, Ralf Reussner
	Attributes to Support the Formulation of Practically Relevant Research Problems in Software EngineeringTechnical Paper WSESE Anrafel Fernandes Pereira, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Daniel Mendez, Jürgen Börstler, Nauman bin Ali, Rahul Mohanani, Darja Šmite, Stefan Biffl, Rogardt Heldal, Davide Falessi, Daniel Graziotin, Marcos Kalinowski Pre-print
	Discussion of Secondary Studies WSESE
	LLM-Assisted Thematic Analysis: Opportunities, Limitations, and RecommendationsTechnical Paper WSESE Tatiane Ornelas Martins Alves, Allysson Allex Araújo, Júlia Condé Araújo, Marina Condé Araújo, Bianca Trinkenreich, Marcos Kalinowski Pre-print
	Multivocal Literature Reviews in Emergent Research Areas: An Experience ReportExperience Report / Work-in-Progress WSESE Lidia López, Carles Farré, Razieh Akbarilalaei, Xavier Franch
	OLAF: Towards Robust LLM-Based Annotation Framework in Empirical Software EngineeringVision / Position Paper WSESE Mia Mohammad Imran, Tarannum Shaila Zaman Pre-print File Attached
	On the Use of a Large Language Model to Support the Conduction of a Systematic Mapping Study: A Brief Report from a Practitioner’s ViewExperience Report / Work-in-Progress WSESE Cauã Ferreira Barros, Marcos Kalinowski, Mohamad Kassab, Valdemar Graciano Neto Pre-print
	On the Use of Large Language Models for Qualitative SynthesisTechnical Paper WSESE Sebastián Pizard, Ramiro Moreira, Federico Galiano, Ignacio Sastre, Lorena Etcheverry Pre-print
	Operationalizing Software Engineering Theories for Practical ValidationTechnical Paper WSESE Isaque Alves, Fabio Kon, Jessica Díaz, Carla Silva Rocha Aguiar
	Towards AI Agents Supported Research Problem FormulationVision / Position Paper WSESE Anrafel Fernandes Pereira, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Daniel Mendez, Marcos Kalinowski Pre-print
	Towards an OSF-based Registered Report Template for Software Engineering Controlled ExperimentsTechnical Paper WSESE Ana B. M. Bett, Thais S. Nepomuceno, Edson OliveiraJr, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Valdemar Graciano Neto, Marcos Kalinowski Pre-print

Call for Papers

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Issues with the motivation and definition of appropriate research questions.
• Issues with the operationalization, e.g., missing standard metrics.
• Issues with the systematic identification of threats to validity and how to address them
• Issues selecting an appropriate study design and the consequences of that selection
• Issues with drawing appropriate conclusions from the findings and generalizing them
• Issues with aggregating results from individual studies
• Issues with reproduction, replication, or families of studies
• Issues with quantitative, qualitative approaches and combined approaches
• Issues with understanding failures and successes: lessons learned
• Issues with automating one or more steps of the empirical process for conducting primary or secondary studies.

Paper categories

Papers must describe original work that has not been submitted to or presented at other forums (although the studies described may have been). Accepted papers will be published in the ICSE workshop proceedings.

• Technical papers (6-8 pages including references): formally describe studies, explain how they were designed and executed to overcome challenges, highlight concrete results, and describe any advances to the state-of-the-art.
• Experience reports / Work in progress (4-6 pages including references) describe the experience in conducting studies and lessons learned that address methodological issues.
• Vision / Position papers (Extended abstracts) (2-4 pages including references) describe new directions in conducting empirical studies including convincing arguments supported by clear rationale.

Submission information

Submissions will be made via hotcrp. Please, note that WSESE does not follow double-anonymous review process. Papers must be formatted according to ICSE 2026 guidelines (submission process: https://conf.researchr.org/track/icse-2026/icse-2026-research-track). Note that submitting the abstract is mandatory. The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available by ACM. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.