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Editorial: A Retrospective and Prospective Reflection

Published: 16 May 2022 Publication History
The midterm renewal of the editor-in-chief for a second three-year term is the time for retrospective and prospective reflections. The last three years have witnessed extraordinary growth of TOSEM that consolidated and extended its traditional role as the premier journal for leading software engineering research. The fast-impact track that we introduced in 2018 to offer a bounded turnaround review time for reasonably sized journal-first papers boosted a healthy growth of high-quality submissions. The new continuous special sections that we started in 2019 with AI and Software Engineering, and continued in 2021 with Security and Software Engineering, consolidated the role of TOSEM as a premier venue for interdisciplinary results. In the last three years, the number of journal-first papers quadrupled, and now more than half of TOSEM submissions are journal-first papers. The new thread of survey papers that we introduced in 2021 to enrich the role of TOSEM with a gallery of portraits of relevant research software engineering areas, with no page limitations, is quickly attracting a healthy number of contributions.
In the next three years, we will introduce new continuous special sections on interdisciplinary topics and further enhance the role of TOSEM as the premier venue for software engineering research with new initiatives: replication packages and preregistered papers. Replication packages will encourage repeatability, reproducibility and replicability of the results, by complementing the excellent experience of software engineering conferences and workshops with a permanent archive of replication data and artifacts linked to TOSEM papers. We will encourage authors to complement their papers with replication packages that we will review with a dedicated process. Preregistered papers will extend the experimental mission of TOSEM, by offering authors the possibility of preregistering papers for early sharing of results and experimental plans, in line with best practice in other scientific fields. Preregistered papers present a research hypothesis and methodology to validate the claims and are later completed with the results of experiments and replication packages that witness the quality and completeness of the results presented in the final papers.
The end of a three-year tenure is also time for acknowledgments. It is with great gratitude that I thank Cristian Cadar and Gregg Rothermel, who rotated off the TOSEM editorial board at the end of December 2021 after six years of invaluable service. I would like to mention all editors who terminated their services in the last three years: Antonio Carzaniga, Mark Harman, Antonia Bertolino, Vittorio Cortellessa, Jin Song Dong, Atanas (Nasko) Rountev, Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey and Tim Menzies. A warm thank-you to the editors who continue serving with great dedication on the board and who do their best to guarantee timely and thorough reviews despite the large increase of workload, due to the many new submissions, the key factor of the current TOSEM success. A special thanks to Paolo Tonella and Abhik Roychoudhury, who chair the continuous special section on AI and software engineering as well as the section on security and software engineering, respectively, to Damian Tamburri and Fabio Palomba, the wizards of the successful social media presence, and to Antónia Lopes, who will substitute for Cristian Cadar in the thankless role of taking care of papers in conflict with the editor-in-chief. A word of deep appreciation for the many reviewers who invest a huge amount of effort in reviewing papers, with a special mention to the distinguished reviewers, who guarantee fast and thorough reviews, a key factor in providing the visibility that the research presented in TOSEM papers deserves.
Mauro Pezzè
Editor-in-Chief

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology  Volume 31, Issue 2
April 2022
789 pages
ISSN:1049-331X
EISSN:1557-7392
DOI:10.1145/3492439
  • Editor:
  • Mauro Pezzè
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 May 2022
Published in TOSEM Volume 31, Issue 2

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