Early Research Achievements (ERA)ICPC 2026

Call for Papers

The Early Research Achievements (ERA) track aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a forum for presenting promising ideas in the 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. Unlike 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 (i.e., 4+1 pages for 5 pages). The purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}

• 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 the ICPC 2026 ERA track must not have been published elsewhere, and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for the ICPC 2026 ERA track. 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 2026 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.
  • While authors have the right to upload preprints on arXiv or similar sites, they must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to ICPC 2026 - ERA track.
  • During the review, authors must not publicly use the submission title and instead use a different paper title for any pre-print in arXiv or similar websites. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

• Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found on the Q&A page from ICSE.

• If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Upon submitting, authors will declare their compliance with such a policy. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

• Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID so that you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM and IEEE are involved with ORCID and may collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. We are committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution, and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

• By submitting to the ICPC ERA Track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE, submission policy of the IEEE, and the authorship policy of the ACM (and associated FAQ). This includes following these points related to the use of Generative AI:

  • “Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM-published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc.). If you are uncertain ­about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgements section of the Work.” - ACM

  • “The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.” - IEEE

  • “If you are using generative AI software tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text in much the same way you would use a typing assistant like Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement or to use a basic word processing system to correct spelling or grammar, it is not necessary to disclose such usage of these tools in your Work.” - ACM
  • The submission must also comply with the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE. ICPC 2026 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 HotCRP submission site by the submission deadline.

We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and submit the PDF later) to enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing properly. It is the sole responsibility of the authors to ensure that the formatting guidelines, double anonymous guidelines, and any other submission guidelines are met at the time of paper submission.

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.

Important Dates

All dates are AoE.

• Abstract registration: November 10, 2025
• Paper submission: November 17, 2025
• Author notification: January 12, 2026
• Camera ready: January 26, 2026

Publication and Presentation

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will receive further instructions for preparing the camera-ready versions of their submissions. All accepted papers will be published in the conference electronic proceedings. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks before the first day of ICPC 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings are not allowed.

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to have a full registration for ICPC 2026, attend the conference, and present the paper in person. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, unless this is impossible due to travel limitations (e.g., related to health or visa). Details about the presentations will follow the notifications.