Cited by 62Software Engineering ResearchInformation Retrieval and Search BehaviorSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices

Evaluating how developers use general-purpose web-search for code retrieval

Open access
Rahman, Md Masudur, Barson, Jed, Paul, Sydney, Kayani, Joshua, Lois, Federico Andrés, Quezada, Sebastián Fernandez, Parnin, Christopher, Stolee, Kathryn T. +1 more·2018·Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Abstract

Search is an integral part of a software development process. Developers often use search engines to look for information during development, including reusable code snippets, API understanding, and reference examples. Developers tend to prefer general-purpose search engines like Google, which are often not optimized for code related documents and use search strategies and ranking techniques that are more optimized for generic, non-code related information.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3196398.3196425

Cites

27 of 27 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Developers spend a significant amount of time searching and foraging for information and organizing and digesting the information they find.

    “Consequently, developers spend a significant amount of time searching and foraging for the information they need and organizing and digesting the information they find [30,31,34,44,48,57].”

    From Using an LLM to Help With Code Understanding (2024) · cites this paper as [57]

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Authors
Rahman, M. M., Barson, J., Paul, S., Kayani, J., Lois, F. A., Quezada, S. F., Parnin, C., Stolee, K. T., & Ray, B.
Affiliations
  • University of Virginia
  • University of Virginia (US)
  • Clemson University (US)
  • North Carolina State University
  • Codealike, Argentina
  • North Carolina State University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Publisher
ACM
Published
2018-05-28
Pages
465-475
OpenAlex
W2793121700
Cited by
62
References
27
Citations by year
2025: 3 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 7
FWCI
5.69
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
National Science Foundation (CCF-16-19123,CNS-16-18771)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
Keywords
code search, search strategies, search engine ranking

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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

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