RE’25 welcomes original research papers focusing on traditional areas of requirements engineering, as well as new ideas which challenge the boundaries of the area.

RE 2025 welcomes original papers focusing on traditional RE topics, such as requirements elicitation, analysis, prioritisation, documentation, validation, evolution, and maintenance. In addition, this year we particularly encourage submissions addressing the theme “Future-proofing Requirements Engineering”. This theme focuses on innovating requirements engineering by embracing AI, DevOps, sustainability, security, personalization, and agile practices. It aims to equip professionals with the tools and methodologies needed to address the evolving challenges and opportunities in software development, ensuring robust, user-centric, and adaptable systems.

Categories of Research Papers

The RE 2025 Research Track invites original submissions of research papers in two categories: Solution-focused papers and Evaluation-focused papers.

Solution-focused Papers present novel or significantly improved solutions for requirements-related problems. This includes new approaches or theories, novel tools, modelling languages, infrastructures, or other technologies. All requirements-related activities, such as elicitation, prioritisation, or analysis are in scope. These papers are mainly evaluated based on the significance of the problem addressed, the novelty of the solution in comparison with existing work, clarity of presentation, technical soundness, and evidence of its benefits. A solution-focused paper does not require a thorough validation, but a preliminary evaluation is expected that shows the effectiveness, ease of use, or other relevant quality attributes of the proposed solution.

Evaluation-focused Papers empirically assess phenomena, theories or real-world artefacts (e.g., methods, techniques, or tools) relevant to requirements engineering. These papers apply empirical software engineering approaches, such as experiments, experimental simulations, case studies, surveys, systematic literature reviews, and others to report on qualitative and/or quantitative data, findings and results. The discussion of lessons learned can complement the empirical results. The evaluation criteria for these papers focus on the soundness of the research questions, the appropriateness and correctness of the study design and data analysis, and considerations of threats to validity. Replication studies are welcome.

Review Criteria

Each category of paper has its own review criteria, which reviewers will use for evaluation. Authors are encouraged to study these criteria as well. We also encourage them to read the paper “The ABC of Software Engineering Research” by Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald, available in Open Access (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3241743), which highlights the inherent limitations of each study type. This is to guide the authors in their study design, and to help reviewers determine which aspects of the study design are open to criticism and which are not.

Review Criteria: Solution-focused Papers

• Novelty: to what extent is the proposed solution novel with respect to the state-of-the-art? To what extent is related work considered? To what extent did the authors clarify their contribution?

• Potential Impact: is the potential impact on research and practice clearly stated? Is the potential impact convincing? Has the proposed solution been preliminarily evaluated to show its potential impact (effectiveness, ease of use, or other relevant quality attributes of the proposed solution)?

• Soundness: has the novel solution been developed following a well-motivated approach? Are the design or methodological choices of the proposed solution justified? Did the authors clearly state the research questions? Is the preliminary evaluation of the solution using rigorous and appropriate research methods? Are the conclusions of the preliminary evaluation logically derived from the data? Did the authors discuss the limitations of the proposed solution? Did the authors discuss the threats to validity of the preliminary evaluation?

• Verifiability: did the authors provide guidelines on how to reuse their artifacts and replicate their results? Did the authors share their software, if any? Did the authors share their data?

• Presentation: is the paper clearly presented and well-structured? To what extent can the content of the paper be understood by the general RE public? If highly technical content is presented, did the authors make an effort to also summarise their proposal in an intuitive way?

Review Criteria: Evaluation-focused Papers

• Novelty: to what extent is the study novel with respect to the related literature? To what extent is related literature considered? To what extent did the authors clarify their contribution? To what extent does the study contribute to extending the body of knowledge in RE?

• Potential Impact: is the potential impact on research and practice clearly stated? Is the potential impact convincing? Was the study carried out in a representative setting?

• Soundness: Are the research methods justified? Are the research methods adequate for the problem at hand? Did the authors clearly state the research questions, data collection, and analysis? Are the conclusions of the evaluation logically derived from the data? Did the authors discuss the threats to validity?

• Verifiability: did the authors provide guidelines on how to reuse their artifacts and replicate their results? Did the authors share their software? Did the authors share their data?

• Presentation: is the paper clearly presented and well-structured? To what extent can the content of the paper be understood by the general RE public? If highly technical content is presented, did the authors make an effort to also summarise their study in an intuitive way?

Open Science Policy

The RE 2025 Research Track has an open science policy with the steering principle that all research results should be accessible to the public and, if possible, empirical studies should be reproducible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open data and open source principles and encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, similar to industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges in sharing research data. For guidelines on how to report qualitative research to ensure the assessment of the reliability and credibility of research results, see the Q&A page. Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked:

• to make their data available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) – and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper; or

• to include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and

• to indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

Supplementary material can be uploaded via the EasyChair site or anonymously linked from the paper submission. Although PC members are not required to look at this material, we strongly encourage authors to use supplementary material to provide access to anonymized data, whenever possible. Authors are asked to carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous policy (see submission instructions). For example, code and data repositories may be exported to remove version control history, scrubbed of names in comments and metadata, and anonymously uploaded to a sharing site to support review. One resource that may be helpful in accomplishing this task is this blog post.

Artifacts

The authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to increase the visibility of their artifacts (software and data) and to obtain an artifact badge. Upon acceptance, the authors can submit their artifacts, which will be evaluated by a committee that determines their sustained availability and reusability.

The format of your paper must strictly adhere to the IEEEtran Proceedings Format. LaTeX users: please use the LaTeX class file IEEEtran v1.8 and the following configuration (without option ‘compsoc’ or ‘compsocconf’): \documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}

Word users: please use this Word template. See the official IEEE Templates page for more information.

Please make sure that your submission:

• does not exceed the respective page limit specified in the track call
• is in PDF format,
• is in letter page size,
• does not have page numbers,
• has all fonts embedded in the PDF file,
• uses only scalable font types (like Type 1, TrueType) — bit-mapped font types (like Type 3) are not acceptable,
• has all figures embedded in vector graphics (if not possible, use a high-resolution bitmap format of at least 300 dpi; do not use JPG, but a lossless format like PNG or GIF),
• has all text in figures and tables large enough and readable when printed,
• has a caption for every figure or table,
• has the title and all headings properly capitalized
• has no orphans and widows (cf. Section Help), and
• does not use footnote references in the abstract.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format via the RE’24 EasyChair system. Select the RE’24 Research Track for your submission.

In order to guide the reviewing process, all authors who intend to submit a paper must first submit the title and abstract. Abstracts should describe explicit coverage of context, objectives, methods, and results and conclusions, and should not exceed 200 words.

Papers must not exceed 10 pages for the main body and up to 2 additional pages for the references. Submissions must be written in English and formatted according to the IEEE formatting instructions. Submissions must be double-blinded in conformance with the instructions below.

Please note: Papers that exceed the length specification, are not formatted correctly, or are not properly double-blinded will be desk-rejected without review. Only full paper submissions will be peer-reviewed. Abstract-only submissions will be discarded without further notice after the submission deadline. Accepted papers may require editing for clarity prior to publication and presentation. They will appear in the IEEE Digital Library.

Instructions for the Double-Blind Review Process

The RE’25 Research track will use a double-blind reviewing process. The goal of double-blind reviewing is to ensure that the reviewers can read and review your paper without having to know who any of the authors are, and hence avoid related bias. Of course, authors are allowed and encouraged to submit papers that build on their previously published work.

In order to prepare your submission for double-blind reviewing, please follow the instructions given below.

1. Omit all names and affiliations of authors from the title page, but keep sufficient space to re-introduce them in the final version should the paper be accepted.
2. Do not include any acknowledgements that might disclose your identity. Leave space in your submission to add such acknowledgements when the paper has been accepted.
3. Refer to your own work in the third person, as you would normally do with the work of others. You should not change the names of your own tools, approaches, or systems, since this would clearly compromise the review process; it would also violate the constraint that “no change is made to any technical details of the work”. Instead, refer to the authorship or provenance of tools, approaches, or systems in the third person, so that it is credible that another author could have written your paper. In particular, never blind references.
4. When providing supplementary material (e.g., tools, data repositories, source code, study protocols), do this via a website that does not disclose your identity. Please refer to the Open Science Policy in the Call for Papers with guidelines on how to anonymize such content.
5. Adhere to instruction 3 when citing previously published own work.
6. Remove identification metadata from the PDF file before submission (in Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can check their presence with File Properties, or Ctrl-D).

Important Policy Announcements

Papers submitted to RE’25 must be original. They will be reviewed under the assumption that they do not contain plagiarized material and have not been published nor submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for RE’25.

RE’25 follows the IEEE policies for cases of double submission and plagiarism