NIER - New Ideas and Emerging ResultsICSE 2023

Call for Papers

The New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) track at ICSE provides a vibrant forum for forward-looking, innovative research in software engineering. Our aim is to accelerate the exposure of the software engineering community to early yet potentially ground-breaking research results, and to techniques and perspectives that challenge the status quo in the discipline. To broadly capture this goal, NIER 2023 will publish the following types of papers.

• Forward-looking ideas: exciting new directions or techniques that may have yet to be supported by solid experimental results, but are nonetheless supported by strong and well-argued scientific intuitions as well as concrete plans going forward.

• Thought-provoking reflections: bold and unexpected results and reflections that can help us look at current research directions under a new light, calling for new directions for future research.

Scope of NIER Track

A NIER track paper is not just a scaled-down version of a ICSE full research track paper. The NIER track is reserved for first class, top quality technical contributions. Therefore, a NIER submission is neither an ICSE full research track submission with weaker or no evaluation, nor an op-ed piece advertising existing and already published results. Authors of such submissions should instead consider submitting to either the main track or one of the many satellite events of ICSE. We require all submissions to the NIER track to include a section titled “Future Plans” where the authors outline the work they plan on doing to turn their new idea and emerging results into a full-length paper in the future.

Evaluation Criteria

Each submission will be reviewed and evaluated in terms of the following quality criteria:

• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions can impact the field of software engineering, and under which assumptions (if any);

• Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art;

• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions and the authors’ plans for future work are based rigorous application of appropriate research methods;

• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ICSE, including clear descriptions, as well as adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided below;

• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted; and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions.

Formatting and Submission

Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions 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).

All NIER submissions must not exceed 4 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. An extra page is allowed for references. All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after the paper is accepted).

Submissions may be made through HotCrp at https://icse2023-nier.hotcrp.com .

By submitting to this track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism ( https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism ) and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ ( https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/plagiarism/plagiarism-faq.html ). In particular, papers submitted to NIER 2023 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for NIER 2023. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action 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. By submitting to this track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM ( https://www.acm.org/publications/policy-on-authorship ), and the authorship policy of the IEEE ( https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/become-an-ieee-journal-author/publishing-ethics/definition-of-authorship/ ).

Important Dates

• NIER Submissions Deadline: 13 October 2022 - Submissions close at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)

• NIER Acceptance Notification: 21 December 2022

• NIER Camera Ready: 19 January 2023

Double-Anonymous Submission Guidelines

The ICSE 2023 NIER track will adopt a double-anonymous review process. No submitted paper may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process; reviewers will be asked to honor the double-anonymous review process as much as possible. Any author having further questions on double-anonymous reviewing is encouraged to contact the track’s program co-chairs by e-mail. Any submission that does not comply with the double-anonymous review process will be desk-rejected.

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for and attend the full 3-day technical conference and present the paper. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, unless this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention).

Open Science Policy 

The NIER track of ICSE 2023 is governed by the ICSE 2023 Open Science policies. In summary, the steering principle is 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. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, similar to industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges in sharing research data. For guidelines on how to report qualitative research to ensure the assessment of the reliability and credibility of research results, see the Q&A page.

Upon submission to the NIER track, authors are asked:

• to make their data available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) – and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper; or

• to include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and 

• to indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

Supplementary material can be uploaded via the HotCRP site or anonymously linked from the paper submission. Although PC members are not required to look at this material, we strongly encourage authors to use supplementary material to provide access to anonymized data, whenever possible. Authors are asked to carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous policy (described above). For example, code and data repositories may be exported to remove version control history, scrubbed of names in comments and metadata, and anonymously uploaded to a sharing site to support review. One resource that may be helpful in accomplishing this task is this blog post.

 Upon acceptance, authors have the possibility to separately submit their supplementary material to the ICSE 2023 Artifact Evaluation track, for recognition of artifacts that are reusable, available, replicated or reproduced.