Journal-first Papers

After the successful editions of Journal-first tracks at previous ESEM editions, ESEM has formed partnerships with prestigious software engineering journals to more formally incorporate journal-first papers into the ESEM program. Through this partnership, authors of journal-first papers accepted in the partnering journals can apply to present their work at ESEM. These presentations will allow the authors to speak directly to their peers, thus increasing awareness of the work, and will provide additional exciting content to the ESEM program.

The journals that have partnered with ESEM are:

  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Information and Software Technology
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • IEEE Software


In addition to the general scope of the conference, journal-first presentation proposals submitted to ESEM 2023 must observe the following criteria:

  • The journal paper was accepted to one of the participating journals no earlier than July 1st, 2021.
  • The paper is a full paper published in one of the partnering journals, i.e. it is not a short paper, commentary, editorial, note, opinion paper, special issue introduction.
  • The paper reports clearly new research results (technical as well as “in practice”/industrial applications are eligible), or presents novel contributions that significantly extend and were not previously reported in prior work.
  • The paper does not extend prior work solely with additional proofs or algorithms (or other such details presented for completeness), or minor enhancements or variants of the results shown in the prior work.
  • The paper does not repurpose materials previously published at a conference targeting academics, educators, students or software professionals.
  • The paper has not been presented at and is not under consideration for journal-first programs of other conferences or previous ESEM conferences.

If in doubt about paper eligibility please contact the track chair directly.

Please submit a max. 1-page PDF file using this link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=esem2023

No special formatting is required as the submitted information will only be used for the assessment and selection process. The submitted file must provide the following information (ideally use the numbering scheme shown below):

  1. Reference to the journal publication (ideally with link)
  2. Proof of acceptance date. This could be, e.g.:
    1. the reference to the journal publication itself if the acceptance date is listed in the published version of the paper, or
    2. the acceptance email if the link to the published paper is still unavailable or if the published version does not list the acceptance date.
  3. Justification that the journal publication fulfills the criteria of a journal-first paper (see bullet list above). Explain why the paper is relevant to an ESEM audience, what in the journal publication is novel, which prior work it builds closely on, and why it still has enough novelty.

Depending on the number of submissions to the journal first track the track chair might have to select which subset of eligible submissions that are selected for presentation at the conference. There is no guarantee of acceptance even if all criteria above are fulfilled.

Please note that the journal-first papers accepted for presentation at ESEM will not appear in ESEM’s proceedings.

Submission date: July 1, 2023

Notification date: July 20, 2023