Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research
This addresses the problem of research quality and peer review inconsistency for the software engineering research community, representing an incremental improvement through standardization.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent research quality and peer review in software engineering by introducing Empirical Standards as natural-language models of community expectations for specific study types, resulting in living documents that will improve research quality and make peer review more effective, reliable, transparent, and fair.
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.