TY - GEN
T1 - An Empirical Analysis of Newcomers’ Contributions to Software-Engineering Conferences
AU - Alchokr, Rand
AU - Krüger, Jacob
AU - Shakeel, Yusra
AU - Saake, Gunter
AU - Leich, Thomas
PY - 2023/11/30
Y1 - 2023/11/30
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Software engineering
KW - Newcomers
KW - Peer review
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85180150822&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-981-99-8085-7_21
DO - 10.1007/978-981-99-8085-7_21
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 978-981-99-8084-0
VL - 1
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 231
EP - 247
BT - Leveraging Generative Intelligence in Digital Libraries: Towards Human-Machine Collaboration
A2 - Goh, Dion H.
A2 - Chen, Shu-Jiun
A2 - Tuarob, Suppawong
PB - Springer
T2 - International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL)
Y2 - 4 December 2023 through 7 December 2023
ER -