Improving Timeliness and Visibility in Publishing Software Engineering Research

Abstract

Ç W E believe that the role of TSE is to serve and connect the growing international community of software engineering researchers and practitioners. The TSE editorial board has continued to uphold the high standard of quality that has been a hallmark of the journal since its inception. In addition, we have worked in a number of areas to provide more timely and more visible content for the community.Timeliness. In 2015 we instituted certain paper review practices and this has led to a reduction in the time it takes to reach a decision and to publish accepted manuscripts.Specifically, the average number of days from submission of a manuscript to TSE until a final decision is sent to the authors has been reduced from 144 in 2014 to 98 in 2016. This represents a more than 6 week reduction in review time and brings the average time in review for TSE to just over 3 months. Review time varies of course, depending on whether a paper is rejected on first review or goes through major revisions, so the average is only part of the story.Our new practices have also reduced the time it takes from original submission to when the electronic version of an accepted manuscript is published. In 2014 this took, on average, 365 days, but we were able to reduce that by over 16 weeks to 250 days in 2016. The upshot is that, on average, accepted TSE manuscripts now appear online in just over 8 months.These improvements have been a team effort and we would like to thank John Grundy and Christine Shaughnessy, who worked with the editorial board to develop and implement strategies for improving the timeliness of TSE reviewing. The editorial board, and the community of reviewers, also deserves thanks for their part in implementing the new review practices.We believe that these efforts have maintained review quality. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that the TSE acceptance rate is the same, at 21.6%, in 2016 as it was in 2014, and the number of papers for which authors have questioned the review outcomes has decreased. We received feedback about review outcomes for 5 papers in 2014, 0.9% of submissions, and for 4 papers in 2016, 0.6% of submissions.Our goal is to continue to perform the highest-quality review, but to make sure that we expedite the review process so that results get out to the community as soon as possible. We believe that this is especially important as we continue to develop the journal-first publication model at TSE (more on that below).Visibility. The TSE editorial board has taken a leadership role in helping to establish a journal-first publication model for the software engineering research community.