The RE@Next! track is a venue to present ongoing work that has generated early or preliminary results. The goal is to trigger new collaborations with like-minded colleagues and potential industrial partners and to receive early feedback which can help you to submit a full research paper to next year’s RE conference.This year, the track will also include vision papers to discuss novel visionary, disruptive, and through-provoking ideas.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

RE is an ever-evolving field, and the community is always prolific in new disruptive ideas, possibilities of synergies with other disciplines, and ambitious research plans. The RE@Next! track is ideal for presenting innovative work that is still in the early stages of development or requires more thorough empirical validation. By collecting feedback from the RE attendees, the authors can develop their work further and present a full paper at the next RE conference or any other RE-relevant venue. RE@Next! is also the right place to share bold, visionary, disruptive, and thought-provoking ideas that can spark discussion at the conference and contribute to new research roadmaps.

RE@Next! 2026 calls for the following two types of papers:

• Research Preview (between 5 and 7 pages plus one page for references): Research Preview papers are expected to present a novel research idea that is not fully developed in terms of solutions or empirical evaluation, or ground-breaking results that may still need full validation. A research preview should include research questions, an envisioned methodology, a proof-of-concept or preliminary evaluation, a research plan, and potential risks and limitations.
• Vision (between 5 and 7 pages plus one page for references): Vision papers are expected to present bold, visionary, disruptive, and thought-provoking ideas to trigger discussion at the conference, potentially creating a paradigm shift in RE and novel long-term objectives. Vision papers can also raise awareness on novel and unexplored topics relevant to RE, at the boundary with other disciplines, including but not limited to ethics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and all other life science and engineering disciplines.

Review Criteria

We have different review criteria that the authors should consider when preparing their submissions and which will be considered by the PC members when reviewing these papers. Each paper type has its review criteria.

Research Preview

• Novelty: Is the proposal sufficiently novel concerning the state-of-the-art? Do the authors discuss related work and identify the gaps their contribution aims to address?
• Soundness of the Research Plan: Do the authors present a convincing research plan? Do the authors discuss the limitations and risks of their plan? Is the plan referring to sound research methods? Do the authors clarify their research questions, planned data collection, and data analysis? Do the authors perform a convincing proof-of-concept or some preliminary research steps?
• Potential for Discussion: Will the presentation of the preview raise the interest of the RE audience? Will the preview lead to a good discussion? Will the audience be able to provide useful feedback to the authors, given the typical background of the RE audience? Can the preview raise controversial opinions in the audience?
• Presentation: Is the paper clearly presented? To what extent can the content of the paper be understood by the general RE readership?

Vision

• Novelty: Is the main idea of the vision sufficiently compelling, thought-provoking, or visionary? To what extent is the main idea exciting for a reader?
• Ambition of the Idea: Is the scope of the idea sufficiently broad to change the state of RE or one of its subfields (e.g., RE and modeling, NLP for RE, AI and RE)? To what extent is the idea creating synergies with other disciplines? Do the authors sketch a convincing and visionary roadmap for research? Are other authors likely to embrace the vision?
• Potential for Discussion: Will the presentation of the idea raise the interest of the RE audience? Will the idea raise discussion? Will the audience be able to provide useful feedback to the authors, given the typical background of the RE audience? Can the idea raise controversial opinions in the audience?
• Presentation: Is the paper clearly presented? To what extent can the content of the paper be understood by the general RE readership?

Open Science Policy and Open Science Competition

The RE conference 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.

Please note that the open science policy is optional and therefore not mandatory for submission or acceptance.

However, compliance with the open science policy is expected, and non-compliance must be justified. Therefore, we expect authors to include an explicit Data Availability Statement at the end of their paper (similar to acknowledgments). Specifically, authors should provide details about any artifact disclosed alongside their submission, such as any dataset, tool, script, experimental protocol, codebook, or other executable or non-executable object produced by or used in the research. Otherwise, the authors should justify the reasons why disclosure is not possible, e.g., due to intellectual property or confidentiality agreements.

Moreover, RE’26 supports the Open Science Competition with two challenges to further promote open science in requirements engineering. All authors are invited to take up these challenges. Fame, honor, Open Science Awards, and prize money await you – don’t miss this chance!

Artifacts

The authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to increase the visibility of their artifacts (such as any dataset, tool, script, experimental protocol, codebook, or other executable or non-executable object produced by or used in the research) 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. All accepted artifacts will compete for the Best Artifact Award.

For further details, please see the Call for Artifacts.

AI Generated Content

Concerning AI Generated content, authors should adopt the IEEE Policy: https://open.ieee.org/author-guidelines-for-artificial-intelligence-ai-generated-text/

“The use of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in an article (including but not limited to text, figures, images, and code) shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any article submitted to an IEEE publication. The AI system used shall be identified, and specific sections of the article that use AI-generated content shall be identified and accompanied by a brief explanation regarding the level at which the AI system was used to generate the content.”

“The use of AI systems for editing and grammar enhancement is common practice and, as such, is generally outside the intent of the above policy. In this case, disclosure as noted above is recommended.”

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format via the RE’26 EasyChair system. Select the RE’26 RE@Next! 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 be between 5 and 7 pages for the main body, plus up to 1 additional page 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’26 RE@Next! 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.

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.
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 the RE’26 RE@Next! Track 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@Next!. RE’26 follows the IEEE policies for cases of double submission and plagiarism

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.