Early Research Achievements (ERA)ICPC 2025

Call for Papers

The Early Research Achievements (ERA) track aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a forum for presenting promising ideas in early stages of research. Ideally, the ERA track seeks papers that challenge the status quo of program comprehension with new research directions and provocative ideas. The ERA track is the perfect place for a paper to set the agenda for a new line of research and a series of future papers. The track targets the same topics of interest as those of the technical research paper track. As opposed to regular research papers, submissions to the ERA track typically describe research in progress and do not require a solid evaluation. Submissions to this track must answer the following questions: What is the new idea? Why is it new? What is the single most related paper? Explicitly addressing these questions is strongly recommended.

Format and Submission

ERA track submissions must be at most 4 pages for the main text, including figures, tables, and appendices. References may optionally continue on 1 additional page (a.k.a. 4+1 pages for 5 pages). The purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

We encourage the authors to upload their paper information early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing.

Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

Submissions to the ERA Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the HotCRP submission site (https://icpc2025-era.hotcrp.com/) by the submission deadline.

By submitting to the ICPC ERA Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism Guidelines. In particular, papers submitted to ICPC 2024 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICPC 2025. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate actions will be taken in all such cases.

To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

The ICPC 2025 ERA Track will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:

Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission. All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person. The submission’s title must differ from the preprints of the authors on ArXiV or similar sites. During the review, authors must not publicly use the submission title. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

The submission must also comply with the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE. ICPC 2025 follows the ACM SIGSOFT rules on Conflicts of Interest and Confidentiality of Submissions, and all authors, reviewers, and organizers will uphold the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Submissions to the ERA Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the ICPC submission site by the submission deadline.

Review and Evaluation Criteria

ERA papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the ERA Program Committee. Submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• Novelty The extent to which the proposed work is novel and original. Submissions are expected to contrast the proposed work with the existing body of literature and state novelty explicitly;
• Significance: The extent to which the proposed work is motivated in the current context and the importance of the contributions is clearly highlighted;
• Soundness: The extent to which a rigorous application of appropriate research methods supports the contributions;
• Presentation: Of particular importance here are the clarity of the text, sufficient detail provided, the quality of figures and tables, and compliance with the submission instructions;
• Evaluation: Although an extensive evaluation is not required, submissions are expected to have a preliminary evaluation;
• Replicability and reproducibility: Although replication packages are not required, submissions are encouraged to share data and scripts to ease replicability and reproducibility.

Publication and Presentation

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions. At least one paper author must register and present the paper at the conference; otherwise, the paper will be excluded from both the program and the proceedings. More details on the presentations will follow the notifications. All accepted papers will be published in the conference’s electronic proceedings. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries.