Peer-Reviewing and Submission Dynamics Around Top Software-Engineering Venues: A Juniors’ Perspective

Academic research, by its nature, is notorious for being a challenging and demanding field. However, these challenges may become more complicated for certain groups of researchers rather than others. For instance, junior researchers who make up a large group of the current scientific community, particularly in the computer science domain, may face various types of impediments. A notable hindrance to realizing the impediments is the difficulty of precisely delineating them. In this paper, we report an empirical investigation to measure the level of awareness of any kind of obstacles that might hinder junior researchers’ publishing ability and disturb their involvement. For this purpose, we conducted a survey targeting active researchers from the Software Engineering field with a total of 52 respondents. We mainly focus on two types of aspects: peer reviewing models and collaboration. Our findings indicate that junior researchers seem to be more comfortable with double-blind reviewing models with more than half (approximately 67.2%) of them voting in favor of this model. The results also show a significant agreement that a lack of experience especially in academic writing and supervision problems constitute the most influential barriers to publishing. Our findings can help understand the needs of junior researchers and provide insights into our research community and its specific groups.