Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research
Paul Ralph, Nauman bin Ali, Sebastian Baltes, Domenico Bianculli, Jessica Díaz, Yvonne Dittrich, Neil Ernst, Michael Felderer, ROBERT H. FELDT, Antonio Filieri, Breno Bernard Nicolau de França, Carlo A. Furia, Greg Gay, Nicolas Gold, Daniel Graziotin, Pinjia He, Rashina Hoda, Natália Juristo, Barbara Ann Kitchenham, Valentina Lenarduzzi · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2020
Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific community's expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical standards for research methods commonly used in software engineering. These living documents, which should be continuously revised to reflect evolving consensus around research best practices, will improve research quality and make peer review more effective, reliable, transparent and fair.