Call for Papers
The Journal-First track is aimed at recent journal-first papers describing original results that relate to program comprehension. We invite the authors of journal-first papers to submit a talk proposal to present their work at ICPC 2026.
For journal papers to be eligible to participate in the Journal-First program, they must:
- Be within the scope of the conference, that is, the paper contains work related to program comprehension (see the ICPC Research Track Call for Papers for possible topics).
- Have been accepted in one of the participating journals:
- ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM),
- Journal of Systems and Software (JSS),
- Science of Computer Programming (SCP),
- Information & Software Technology (IST),
- Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE).
- Have been accepted on or after November 1, 2024, and before the Journal-first submission deadline of January 16, 2026.
- Meet the journal-first criteria (see below).
- Not have already been presented, or are currently being considered for, journal-first or similar initiatives of other conferences.
For a journal paper to be considered as Journal-first, it must adhere to all of the following criteria:
- It must report completely new research results or present novel contributions that significantly extend and were not previously reported in prior work.
- It may not extend any of the author’s prior work solely with additional proofs or algorithms (or other such details presented for completeness), additional empirical results, or minor enhancements or variants of the results presented in the prior work.
- It may not repurpose materials previously published at a conference that targets software professionals.
Format and Submission
Interested authors should submit a short talk proposal (as one PDF file, max. two pages) consisting of the (1) paper title, (2) abstract, (3) a short statement on how the work satisfies the journal first criteria and the scope of ICPC, and (4) the PDF of the accepted paper. Please list all authors of the original journal paper as authors in HotCRP.
Submissions can be made via the ICPC Journal-First Track submission site (https://icpc2026-journalfirst.hotcrp.com/) by the submission deadline.
Review and Evaluation Criteria
The Journal-first committee will evaluate if the submission is within the scope of the ICPC conference and, in general, fulfills the eligibility criteria mentioned above. We plan to select as many papers as possible for inclusion in the Journal-first program. In case the interest in the Journal-first is higher than expected, the track chairs, together with the conference technical program co-chairs, will reserve the right to prioritize papers that better fit the conference technical program.
As the papers have been already reviewed and accepted by high-quality journals, they will not be reviewed again for technical correctness. They will be checked for the Journal-first criteria and prioritized according to the conference theme. Authors will not receive any reviews with the notification.
Publication and Presentation
At least one author of each accepted Journal-first contribution must register and attend the full conference in person to present the paper. Failure to present the paper might result in exclusion from future Journal-first programs.
The journal-first papers will not be part of the ICPC proceedings. However, the conference online program will contain a hyperlink to the journal paper (if already published) or, in case the paper hasn’t been published yet, to its preprint (we will encourage the authors of accepted Journal-First track to make a preprint of the paper available prior to ICPC).
