Call for Papers

The MSR Data/Tool Showcase track aims to actively promote and recognize the creation of reusable datasets and tools that are designed and built not only for a specific research project, but for the MSR community as a whole. These datasets and tools should enable other practitioners and researchers to jumpstart their own research efforts, and also enable the reproducibility of earlier work. The MSR Data/Tool Showcase papers can be descriptions of datasets or tools built by the authors that can be used by other practitioners or researchers, and/or descriptions of the use of tools built by others to obtain specific research results.

Types of MSR’22 Data and Tool Showcase Track Submission

MSR’22 Data/Tool Showcase Track will accept two types of submissions: (1) data showcase papers and (2) reusable tool showcase papers.

The authors should prepare submissions with a maximum of 4 pages, plus 1 additional page of references. Submissions should be submitted to the HotCRP submission site on or before Thursday 27th January 2022.

The Review Criteria for the Data/Tool Showcase submissions are as follows:

• The value, usefulness, and reusability of the datasets or tools.
• The quality of the presentation.
• The clarity of relation with related work and its relevance to mining software repositories.
• The availability of the datasets or tools.

1. Data Showcase

MSR Data showcase submissions are expected to include:

• A description of the data source,
• A description of the methodology used to gather the data (including provenance and the tool used to create/generate/gather the data, if any),
• A description of the storage mechanism, including a schema if applicable,
• If the data has been used by the authors or others, a description of how this was done including references to previously published papers,
• A description of the originality of the data set (that is, even if the data set has been used in a published paper, its complete description must be unpublished) and similar existing datasets (if any)
• A description of the design of the tool, and how to use the tool in practice ideas for future research questions that could be answered using the data set,
• Ideas for further improvements that could be made to the data set, and
• Any limitations and/or challenges in creating or using the data set.

2. Reusable Tool Showcase

MSR Reusable Tool showcase submissions are expected to include:

• A description of the tool, which includes the background, motivation, novelty, overall architecture, detailed design, and preliminary evaluation of the tool, as well as the link to download or access the tool.
• A description of the design of the tool, how to use the tool in practice.
• Clear installation instructions and example data set that allow the reviewers to run the tool.
• If the tool has been used by the authors or others, a description of how the tool was used including references to previously published papers Ideas for future reusability of the tools
• Any limitations of using the tools

The dataset/tool should be made available at the time of submission of the paper for review but will be considered confidential until publication of the paper. The dataset/tool should include detailed instructions about how to set up the environment (e.g., requirements.txt), how to use the datasets/tools (e.g., how to import the data or how to access the data once it has been imported, how to use the tool with a running example).

At a minimum, upon publication of the paper, the authors should archive the data or tool on a persistent repository that can provide a digital object identifier (DOI) such as zenodo.org, figshare.com, Archive.org, or institutional repositories. In addition, the DOI-based citation of the dataset or the tool should be included in the camera-ready version of the paper.

Data/Tool showcase submissions are not:

• Empirical studies.
• Datasets that are based on poorly explained or untrustworthy heuristics for data collection, or results of trivial application of generic tools.

If custom tools have been used to create the data set, we expect the paper to be accompanied by the source code of the tools, along with clear documentation on how to run the tools to recreate the data set. The tools should be open source, accompanied by an appropriate license; the source code should be citable, i.e., refer to a specific release and have a DOI. GitHub provides an easy way to make source code citable. If you cannot provide the source code or the source code clause is not applicable (e.g., because the data set consists of qualitative data), please provide a short explanation of why this is not possible.

Important Dates

• Abstract Deadline: Tuesday 25th January 2022
• Paper Deadline: Thursday 27th January 2022
• Author Notification: March 8
• Camera Ready Deadline: Late March

Submission

Please submit your data and tool paper(s) (maximum 4 pages, plus 1 additional page of references) via the HotCRP submission site on or before Thursday 27th January 2022.

Submitted papers will undergo single-blind peer review. We opt for single-blind peer review (as opposed to the double-blind peer review of the main track) due to the requirement above to describe the ways how data has been used in the previous studies, including the bibliographic reference to those studies. Such a reference is likely to disclose the authors’ identity.

To make research datasets and tools accessible and citable, we further encourage authors to attend to the FAIR rules, i.e., datasets and tools should be: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

All authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as 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). To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}

\acmConference[MSR 2022]{MSR '22: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories}{May 23–24, 2022}{Pittsburgh, PA, USA}

We encourage authors to upload their paper info early (the PDF can be submitted later). All submissions must adhere to the following requirements:

• Submissions must not exceed the page limit (4 pages plus 1 additional page of references for short papers). The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after acceptance).
• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM formatting instructions. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

Any submission that does not comply with these requirements is likely to be desk rejected by the PC Chairs without further review. In addition, by submitting to the MSR Technical Track, the authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the following policies:

• The ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to MSR 2022 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for MSR 2022. 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 (including immediate rejection and reporting of the incident to ACM/IEEE). 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 authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to fill a copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing the camera-ready version of their papers. At least one author of each paper is expected to register and present the paper at the MSR 2022 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the electronic proceedings of the conference.

For enquiries, please contact the MSR Data/Tool Co-Chairs at chakkrit@monash.edu and xin.xia@acm.org