SERG talk: Guidelines for Improving Paper and Peer Review Quality
When: January 27, 2021, 14:00 - 15:00
Where: Online
Abstract: The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative, which I will present in this talk, seeks to increase paper quality, review quality, acceptance rates and consensus around research practices by generating and evolving empirical standards. An Empirical Standard is a brief public document that communicates expectations for a given kind of study. Empirical standards contain lists of specific practices or attributes related to a particular method, e.g., “uses random assignment” (experiment) or “presents clear chain of evidence from interviewee quotations to proposed concepts” (qualitative survey). Through this approach they allow crucial decisions about what is and is not acceptable scientific practice to be made by a community, collectively, rather than by a reviewer, individually.
In the talk I will present the Initiative, the structure of a standard’s presentation, the outline of the provided standards covering engineering, qualitative, and quantitative methods, and focus on a few representative standards.
Short bio: Diomidis Spinellis is Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Management Science and Technology of the Athens University of Economics and Business and Professor of Software Analytics in the Department of Software Technology of the Delft University of Technology. He is a co-author of the ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standards document.
