An Empirical Analysis of Newcomers’ Contributions to Software-Engineering Conferences

Newcomer researchers play a key role in advancing research: They introduce new ideas and perspectives, have a high motivation, and can positively impact the performance of long-lasting teams. However, newcomers face obstacles when engaging in research—some of which they can overcome based on learning and mentoring (e.g., using research methods, scientific writing), but also potential biases of other researchers or unfair barriers (e.g., gate keeping, perceived expertise). In this paper, we report a study on newcomers’ contributions to three major software-engineering conferences, and what these contributions may indicate regarding potential obstacles. Precisely, we investigated to what extent newcomers contributed to the main tracks of the highly reputable software-engineering conferences ASE, ESEC/FSE, and ICSE, analyzing a total of 4,620 papers and 7,337 authors. Furthermore, we investigated whether the reviewing model impacted the extent of newcomers’ contributions, since all three conferences recently switched from single-blind to double-blind reviewing. The results indicate a decline in newcomer researchers contributing to the conferences, a trend that somewhat stabilized in recent years at a fortunately high level (i.e., more than 50% of authors for all conferences). Furthermore, for ICSE, we found an indicator that the changed reviewing model mitigated the declining trend, but this was not visible for the other conferences, and that more newcomers are involved in high-reputation papers.