Research Project

This is a thesis project within the Department of Reuse.

Description

Reuse in computer science research is commonplace, but undervalued. One kind in particular is stepping-stone reuse.
This is the case when researchers build on previously release work either by themselves, but also by other researchers.
In this thesis, this kind of research is to be sought out automatically in publications.

Research Questions

1. How prevalent is stepping-stone reuse in papers in software engineering?
2. Is stepping-stone reuse more prominent in certain venues? (e.g. a certain conference, conferences vs. journals)
3. Is stepping-stone reuse more prominent for certain topics? (e.g. in empirical software engineering)

Research Methodology

Using methods from information retrieval and natural language processing publications from conferences may need to be scanned to extract this sort of reuse. In a manual first step it might be necessary to model signal phrases and structures in these publications to allow for better detections.

Alternatively, a machine learning model may be trained on a training set to be created in this thesis project.

The quality of the detection needs to be evaluated within this thesis project in order to assess the number of false positives and false negatives the developed approach will produce.

Related Work

• Ben Hermann, Stefan Winter, and Janet Siegmund. 2020. Community expectations for research artifacts and evaluation processes. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2020). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 469–480. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3368089.3409767
• Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Neil Ernst, Ben Hermann, and Tim Menzies. 2021. Software Research Artifacts: "Reusable'' does not mean "Reused''. Submitted to Communications of the ACM (CACM) - copy can be obtained from the supervisor