Registered ReportsMSR 2026

Call for Registered Reports

The Springer Journal of Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), in conjunction with the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference, is continuing the Registered Reports (RR) track. The RR track of MSR 2026 has two goals:

1. Providing early feedback to authors in their initial study design. For papers submitted to the RR track, methods and proposed analyses are reviewed before execution.
2. To prevent HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known) for empirical studies.

Pre-registered studies follow a two-step process:

• Stage 1: Authors submit a report that describes a study they plan to undertake. The submitted report is evaluated by the reviewers of the RR track of MSR 2026. If accepted, authors of accepted pre-registered studies will be given the opportunity to present their report at MSR.
• Stage 2: Once a report has passed Stage 1, the authors conduct the study (i.e., the actual data collection, experiments, and analysis will take place) and they prepare a full paper based on the original plan and obtained results (which may also be negative) to be submitted for review to EMSE.

Type of Study

The RR track of MSR 2026 supports two types of papers:

Confirmatory Study: The researcher has a fixed hypothesis (or several fixed hypotheses) and the objective of the study is to find out whether the hypothesis is supported by the facts/data. An example of a completed confirmatory study:

• Inozemtseva, L., & Holmes, R. (2014, May). Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 435-445).

Exploratory Study: The researcher does not have a hypothesis (or has one that may change during the study). Often, the objective of such a study is to understand what is observed and answer questions such as WHY, HOW, WHAT, WHO, or WHEN. We include in this category registrations for which the researcher has an initial proposed solution for an automated approach (e.g., a new deep-learning-based defect prediction approach) that serves as a starting point for his/her exploration to reach an effective solution. Examples of completed exploratory studies:

• Gousios, G., Pinzger, M., & Deursen, A. V. (2014, May). An exploratory study of the pull-based software development model. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 345-355).
• Rodrigues, I. M., Aloise, D., Fernandes, E. R., & Dagenais, M. (2020, June). A Soft Alignment Model for Bug Deduplication. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (pp. 43-53).

Evaluation Criteria and Possible Outcomes

The RR PC members will review papers in both Stage 1 and Stage 2. Four PC members will review the Stage 1 submission, and three will review the Stage 2 submission. The reviewers will evaluate RR track submissions based on the following criteria:

• The relevance to MSR (out of scope registrations that do no align with the venue’s topics will be desk rejected).
• The importance of the research question(s).
• The logic, rationale, and plausibility of the proposed hypotheses.
• The soundness and feasibility of the methodology and analysis pipeline (including statistical power analysis where appropriate).
• (For a confirmatory study) Whether the clarity and degree of methodological detail is sufficient to exactly replicate the proposed experimental procedures and analysis pipeline.
• (For a confirmatory study) Whether the authors have pre-specified sufficient outcome-neutral tests for ensuring that the results obtained can test the stated hypotheses, including positive controls and quality checks.
• (For exploratory study, if applicable) The description of the data set that is the base for exploration.

The outcome of the RR report review is one of the following:

• In-Principle Acceptance (IPA): The reviewers agree that the study is relevant, the outcome of the study (whether confirmation or rejection of the hypothesis) is of interest to the community, the protocol for data collection is sound, and the analysis methods are adequate. The authors can engage in the actual study for Stage 2. If the protocol is adhered to (or deviations are thoroughly justified), the study is likely to be published. Of course, this being a journal submission, a revision of the submitted manuscript may be necessary. Reviewers will especially evaluate how precisely the protocol of the accepted pre-registered report is followed, or whether deviations are well-justified.
• Continuity Acceptance (CA): The reviewers agree that the study is relevant and the (initial) methods appear to be appropriate. However, for exploratory studies, implementation details and post-experiment analyses or discussions (e.g., why the proposed automated approach does not work) may require follow-up revisions. We will do our best to assign the same reviewers to Stages 1 and 2.
• Rejection: The reviewers do not agree on the relevance of the study or are not convinced that the study design is sufficiently mature. Comments are provided to the authors to improve the study design before starting it.
• Note: For MSR 2026, only confirmatory studies are granted an IPA. An exploratory study in software engineering often cannot be adequately assessed until after the study has been completed and the findings are elaborated and discussed in a full paper. For example, consider a study in an RR proposing defect prediction using a new deep learning architecture. This work falls under the exploratory category. It is difficult to offer IPA, as we do not know whether it is any better than a traditional approach based on, e.g., decision trees. Negative results are welcome; however, the negative results paper must go beyond presenting “we tried and failed”, but rather provide interesting insights to readers, e.g., why the results are negative or what that means for further studies on this topic (following criteria of REplication and Negative Results (RENE) tracks, e.g., https://saner2023.must.edu.mo/negativerestrack). Furthermore, it is important to note that authors are required to document all deviations (if any) in a section of the paper.

Key Dates

The timeline for the MSR 2026 RR track will be as follows:

• November 14, 2025: Authors submit an abstract of their initial report.

• November 21, 2025: Authors submit their initial report.

• December 23, 2025: Authors receive PC members’ reviews.
• January 16, 2026: Authors submit a response letter + revised report in a single PDF.
  • The response letter should address reviewers’ comments and questions.
  • Combined, the length of the response letter + revised report must not exceed 12 pages (plus 1 additional page of references).
  • The response letter does not need to follow ACM formatting instructions.
• February 4, 2026: Notification of Stage 1
  • Outcome: in-principal acceptance, continuity acceptance, or rejection.
• Before February 26, 2026: Authors submit their accepted RR report to any preprint hosting platform, such as OSF Preprints (https://osf.io/preprints) and SSRN (https://www.ssrn.com), as long as it assigns a publicly accessible DOI.
  • To be checked by PC members for Stage 2
  • Note: Due to the timeline, RRs will not be published in the MSR 2026 proceedings, but the authors of accepted reports will be required to present their reports at MSR 2026.
• Before September 28, 2026: Authors submit a full paper to EMSE. Instructions will be provided later. However, the following constraints will be enforced:
  • Justifications must be given for any change of authors. If the authors are added/removed or the author order is changed between the original Stage 1 and the EMSE submission, all authors will need to complete and sign a “Change of authorship request form”. The Editors-in-Chief of EMSE and chairs of the RR track reserve the right to deny author changes. If you anticipate any authorship changes, please reach out to the chairs of the RR track as early as possible.
  • PC members who reviewed a RR in Stage 1 and their directly supervised students cannot be added as authors of the corresponding submission in Stage 2.

Submission Process

Registered report submissions must not exceed 6 pages (plus 1 additional page of references). All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict. Submissions must conform to the ACM double-column template, specified in the ACM Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines. Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

Submissions can be made via the submission site (https://msr2026-rr.hotcrp.com) by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with the instructions above and the mandatory information specified in the Author Guide is likely to be desk rejected.

Publication and Presentation

A full registration and in-person presentation are required for papers accepted at the conference.

Submission Policies

By submitting, the authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the following policies: The ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to MSR 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for MSR 2026. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases (including immediate rejection and reporting of the incident to ACM/IEEE). To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

By submitting to MSR 2026, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE. This includes the following points related to the use of Generative AI:

“Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM-published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc.). If you are uncertain about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgments section of the Work.” - ACM

“The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgments section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.” - IEEE

“If you are using generative AI software tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text in much the same way you would use a typing assistant like Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement or to use a basic word processing system to correct spelling or grammar, it is not necessary to disclose such usage of these tools in your Work.” - ACM.