The DOI matches its Crossref record; 22 of the 22 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Research artifacts in software engineering publications: Status and trends
Abstract
The Software Engineering (SE) community has been embracing the open science policy and encouraging researchers to disclose artifacts in their publications. However, the status and trends of artifact practice and quality remain unclear, lacking insights on further improvement. In this paper, we present an empirical study to characterize the research artifacts in SE publications. Specifically, we manually collect 1,487 artifacts from all 2,196 papers published in top-tier SE conferences (ASE, FSE, ICSE, and ISSTA) from 2017 to 2022. We investigate the common practices (e.g., URL location and format, storage websites), maintenance activities (e.g., last update time and URL validity), popularity (e.g., the number of stars on GitHub and characteristics), and quality (e.g., documentation and code smell) of these artifacts. Based on our analysis, we reveal a rise in publications providing artifacts. The usage of Zenodo for sharing artifacts has significantly increased. However, artifacts stored in GitHub tend to receive few stars, indicating a limited influence on real-world SE applications. We summarize the results and provide suggestions to different stakeholders in conjunction with current guidelines.
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Cites
1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility
Baker, M. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/533452a · Cited by 4,209
Practitioners' expectations on automated fault localization
Kochhar, P. S., Xia, X., Lo, D., & Li, S. (2016) · Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis · doi:10.1145/2931037.2931051 · Cited by 346
Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot
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Software Documentation Issues Unveiled
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A large-scale study of the evolution of web pages
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A systematic review on the code smell effect
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On the Reproducibility and Replicability of Deep Learning in Software Engineering
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Community expectations for research artifacts and evaluation processes
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Research works printed but not linked: 2
- ACM, 2020
- Jones, 2021, Robustifying links to combat reference rot, Code4Lib J., 50
Metadata
- Authors
- Liu, M., Huang, X., He, W., Xie, Y., Zhang, J. M., Jing, X., Chen, Z., & Ma, Y.
- Venue
- Journal of Systems and Software
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2024-07
- Volume
- 213
- Pages
- 112032
- ISSN
- 0164-1212
- Cited by
- 10
- References
- 22
- Language
- en
- Licence
- www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
- www.elsevier.com/legal/tdmrep-license (tdm)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-017 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-037 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-012 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-029 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-004 (stm-asf)
- Funders
- National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFF0901100)
- European Research Council (741278)
- Peking University
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- Liu, M., Huang, X., He, W., Xie, Y., Zhang, J. M., Jing, X., Chen, Z., & Ma, Y. (2024). Research artifacts in software engineering publications: Status and trends. Journal of Systems and Software. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112032
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
