Ethics (Engineering Research)

A study in which a novel technological or socio-technical artifact is created and evaluated.

Application

This standard applies to studies that propose and evaluate technological artifacts, including algorithms, models, languages, methods, systems, tools, and other computer-based technologies.

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

describes anticipated benefits of the artifact for individuals, communities, organizations or society as a whole
describes any burdens created by using the artifact, on whom these burdens fall, whether burderns fall dispropritonately on vulnerable individuals or groups and, if so, attempts to mitigate such burdens
describes all plausible, non-trivial potential harms arising from using the artifact (e.g. in terms of privacy (including surveillance and workplace monitoring), security, exclusion, bias, inequality, accessibility, deception, pollution, environmental destructiion and other societal, community, organizational, individual or ecological impacts) and attempts to mitigate such harms
considers ways in which the artifact could be abused, misused, hacked, compromised, or otherwise applied to nefarious or unethical purposes, and describes attmpts to mitigate such abuses
considers unintended consequences of using the artifact and describes attempts to mitigate them
considers unethical or otherwise problematic behaviours that could be encouraged by using or misuing the artifact in the anticipated context of use and describes attempts to mitigate such behaviours
describes the environmental impact of the work in terms of carbon emissions (for development and use) and other respects (e.g. materials, mineral mining required)
justifies the potential burdens, harms, misuses, unintended consequences and environmental impacts of the artifact in terms of its benefits, considering particularly the relationship between who reaps the benefits and who suffers the burdens, harms, etc. how the latter are mitigated.

Desirable Attributes

quantifies the carbon emissions generated by (1) developing and (2) using the artifact, especially for machine learning¹
quantify carbon emissions over the whole line of research, not just this part of the work (for artifacts emerging from a line of research) ¹
relates ethics discussion to frameworks of professional practice or the UN Sustainable Development Goals
discuss relative harms and benefits when describing alternatives in related work

Extraordinary Attributes

provides complete statement of ethical approval from institutional REC/IRB in relation specifically to the technological artifact (typically as supplementary materials)
describes measures taken to reduce the environmental impact of the work such as carbon offsetting

General Quality Criteria

Assessing the ethicality of a new technology is mainly about (1) the degree to which potential harms are acknowledged and mitigated, and (2) juxtaposing harms and benefits. We do not reject a new technology because of the potential for harm—virtually every technology has costs and potential for harms and misuse. Rather, we reject a paper when it evinces a general lack of awareness or consideration of potential harms, obfuscation of harms, when the harms outweigh the benefits, or when benefits accrue to people who don’t really need them (e.g. the rich and powerful) while the costs are borne by different people who cannot afford them (e.g. the poor and vulnerable).

Antipatterns

Justifying an artifact as beneficial solely on its own merits without consideration of the broad impacts of its use
Justifying an artifact as beneficial solely on the grounds that it is similar to other artifacts that have been useful and without considering the impacts specifically in this case
Justifying an artifact as beneficial without considering the potential contexts of use, including beyond those targeted
Failure to identify any misuse or risk scenarios

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Justified inability to quantify machine learning carbon costs¹

Invalid Criticisms

“The study was not approved by an ethical review board” is not grounds for rejection unless there is a substantive ethical concern relating to the artifact that such a board should have prevented.
“There exists a potential harm, burden, etc. that the paper did not consider” is not by itself grounds for rejection in a paper that discusses many harms, burdens, etc.; it is normal for reviewers to dream up scenarios that authors have not considered.

Ethics (Studies with Human Participants)

A study in which information and data is gathered directly from human beings

Application

This standard applies to studies in which one or more human beings other than the researchers take part in the research (e.g. Action Research, Case Study, Grounded Theory, Qualitative Surveys, Experiments, Questionnaire Surveys).

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

describes all plausible, non-trivial potential risks or harms to participants (if any)
describes any steps taken to mitigate risks or harms
explains how benefits of the research justify any non-trivial risks or harms
explains how participants were recruited
explains the compensation (if any) offered for participation and how coercion was mitigated
explains how participants' free, individual, informed consent to participate was obtained¹
explains how participants' privacy and reputation was respected in the conduct and reporting of the research.²
explains how data about or supplied by participants was protected in the conduct of the research³
explains the permissions given by participants for publication and sharing of their data by the researchers, and the permissions given by participants for others to use this data in future
states any barriers to participation in the research process and EITHER justifies them OR explains how they were minimized⁴

Desirable Attributes

cites (with application number) approval of a national, institutional, or other appropriate scholarly ethical review board
cites the reference ethics framework(s) within which the work was conducted⁵⁾
discusses justice, ethics, diversity and inclusion issues arising from eligibility and participation
explains how the impact of the research process on participants was considered
explains, where relevant, how risks to the researchers themselves were mitigated in the conduct of the research
where the research refers to identifiable persons (other than participants), explains how their privacy is respected and protected (since they have not formally consented to participation)

Extraordinary Attributes

supplementary materials include a complete application to a scholarly ethical review board and documentation of its approval

General Quality Criteria

Research should balance the anticipated benefits of a study with the potential risks and/or harms to participants, minimizing risk or harm wherever possible. Studies involving human beings should respect participants' rights and abilities to decide whether to participate and/or withdraw, on the basis of full information about the risks and benefits of participating, the measures that will be taken to protect them (including their privacy and reputation), and where appropriate, measures to protect their organization(s).

Antipatterns

Willful blindness to risks and harms to participants; justifying risks and harms on the basis that research is generally beneficial rather than in respect of benefits of the particular study; downplaying risks and harms during recruitment, consent or reporting.

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Potentially damaging the reputation of a named organization by responsibly disclosing or reporting impartial, corroborated evidence of illegal, dangerous or unethical behavior.⁶
The requirement to explain informed consent procedures may be modified where deception is a necessary part of the research protocol (although this itself must be explained in full⁷ ).
Maintaining participants' privacy is not required where it is demonstrated that this was clearly explained and freely agreed to by the participants during recruitment and consent.

Invalid Criticisms

"Study was not approved by an ethical review board" is not itself grounds for rejection unless there is a substantive ethical concern that such a board should have prevented.
"No consent form was used" is not a valid criticism where consent was given orally or implied (e.g., by completing a questionnaire that is explicitly part of a research project).

Note

Rarely, ethical research may require unlawful action. Ethical frameworks like Menlo include legal compliance so that the ethicality and legality of research can be weighed together. Therefore, the presence of a legally dubious action is not grounds for rejection if and only if the action is ethically justified, including the risks to the researcher.

Ethics (Studies with Secondary Human Data)

A study that analyzes data previously gathered from (or supplied by) humans and held by a third-party

Application

This standard applies to studies in which data previously gathered from humans and held by an organization is used by the researchers (e.g. Exploratory Data Science). This may involve researchers gathering existing data themselves through technical means (e.g. website scraping) from a site where directly-contributed data is visible (e.g. social media sites, software repositories), or using datasets collected, curated and made available by others (e.g. published research datasets).

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

describes all plausible, non-trivial potential risks or harms to data custodians and data subjects
describes any steps taken to mitigate risks or harms
justifies the taking of risks and/or the causing of harm in terms of the claimed benefits of the research.
states the grounds on which the data used was legitimately available to the researchers¹
explains how the research falls within the permissions given by the original data subjects²
explains the provenance of the original data in terms of the data custodian's documentation of the conditions of data capture, and whether this capture met the standards required for Studies with Human Participants (particularly in respect of consent for capture and future use).
explains how participants' privacy and reputation was respected in the conduct and reporting of the research. In particular, where multiple datasets are combined, explains how any additional privacy risks raised by this were mitigated.
explains how the privacy and consent of data subjects was respected during the research with reference to the conditions under which data was made available to the researcher³ , and how any further publication of the data (in existing, combined, or transformed form) will respect the expectations and consent given by data subjects.

Desirable Attributes

explains how the researchers considered the impact of the research on those whose data was used
cites, with application number, approval of a national, institutional, or other appropriate scholarly ethical review board
cites the reference ethics framework(s) within which the work was conducted⁴

Extraordinary Attributes

supplementary materials include a complete application to a scholarly ethical review board and documentation of its approval

General Quality Criteria

Research should balance the anticipated benefits of a study with the potential risks and/or harms to participants, minimizing risk or harm wherever possible. In secondary data studies, researchers typically do not have access to the original data subjects and may therefore need to justify research based on information and terms supplied and imposed by intermediaries (to whom researchers also have ethical responsibilities). Researchers' ethical responsibility to the original participants remains and thus they have an ethical duty to seek and verify the provenance of the data they use, verify whether their intended use falls within the reasonable expectation and consent of those whose data it is, and to respect the rights and roles of the intermediaries as the proximate representatives of those for whose data they are responsible. Any use of data that is not legitimately available must be justified on strong and documented ethical grounds.

Antipatterns

Justifying data use as acceptable solely because it is technically available (e.g. machine accessible or downloadable) as opposed to legitimately available (i.e. under the custodian's terms of access and use, and with verified provenance permitting the current use under the terms of the original data surrender).⁵
Reidentification (or creating the conditions for reidentification) of the data subjects whose data is analyzed.⁶
Failing to consider potential, harmful, unintended consequences of the research.
Accepting (e.g. from a corporation) a dataset that has been collected without adhering to the principles set forth in the Ethics (Studies with Human Participants) Standard ; e.g. without participants' consent or appropriate safeguards.

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Using data outside of the norms of legitimate access on strong and documented ethical grounds (preferably citing approval of a national, institutional, or other appropriate scholarly ethical review board).
Reidentification of data subjects where there are strong and documented ethical grounds for disclosure of identity (e.g. to expose subject's unethical behavior).
Using data with unknown provenance if and only if data provenance information is unavailable from the custodian and the use is justified in terms of the balance between research benefit and risks to those whose data is used.

Invalid Criticisms

"Study was not approved by an ethical review board" is not grounds for rejection unless there is a substantive ethical concern that such a board should have prevented.

Note

Information Visualization

Diagrams that map quantitative values to visual objects their visual attributes to aid understanding

Application

This crosscutting guideline applies to visualizations of quantitative data. Graphical visualization consists of diagrams that map quantitative values to visual objects (e.g. segments, points, circles) and to their visual attributes (e.g. length, position, size, color). Their goal is to support the reader in a data understanding task. It does not apply to:

Software visualization, such as showing structure or architecture of a software product.
Diagrams not encoding quantitative values, e.g. UML activity diagrams, BPMN diagrams, flow charts.
Tables that encode data in textual format.

Attributes

proportionality
- the values/measures are reported in a uniformly proportional way: the ratio of two values is equal to the geometrical ratio on paper (or screen) of the corresponding visual attributes (length, area, slope, etc.) [lie factor]
- the visual attributes provide an accurate perception of the proportion, according to the attribute ranking:
  - position along a common scale
  - position along identical scales
  - length
  - angle/slope
  - area
- diagrams are rendered in 2D and refrain from 3D perspectives that might alter the perception of dimensions
- encoding of ordinal measures through colors use saturation and lightness and avoid rainbow palettes
utility
- all the elements in the diagram convey useful information or support clarity
- the diagram does not contain chartjunk or over-designed elements that interfere with perception or understanding
- different colors represent data variation
- the background is light and uniform
- there are no decorative 3D effects
- bright and saturated colors are used solely for emphasis
- grids are light and do not obscure data
- annotations are less prominent than data
clarity
- the diagram layout and text annotation support the understanding of the data and make the visualization as much self-contained as possible
  - the title (or figure caption) concisely conveys what is the content of the visualization and the intended message
  - text annotations guide the reader in understanding the message
- direct labeling is used instead of a separate legend especially when there are more than two color codes
- color encoding of categorical measures is limited to at most 5 distinct levels; more colors are too difficult to discriminate
- when data points are very dense, appropriate techniques are applied to mitigate overplotting
- axes and the relative tick marks are labelled
- the size of text is large enough to make it readable.
- avoid rotated or vertical text
- image format is preferably vectorial, if a raster format is used it must have sufficient resolution.
diagram design
- the diagram contains at most two axes unless a surface (function of two variables) is the standard representation
- use of logarithmic scales is explicitly highlighted
- data objects (e.g. bars) are sorted in a meaningful way (e.g. ascending, descending or grouped) to ease comparison
- non-interactive visualization should serve a single understanding task
- the type of visualization is appropriate for the visual understanding task that it is intended to support (Table 1)
- the design is colorblind-friendly – it uses a colorblind-safe palette for color coding or a redundant visual variable (e.g., saturation, pattern)
- (optional) several data series should usually be reported using multiple small diagrams rather than in a single crowded diagram

Table 1: When to use which visualization

Understanding task	Commonly used type of visualization
Comparison	Bar plot, Dot plot, Heatmap, Strip plot, Isotype
Correlation	Scatter plot, Bubble chart, Slope chart, Dumbbell plot, Diverging bars
Deviation	Bullet graph, Gauge
Distribution	Histogram, Frequency polygon, Cumulative density, Quantile-quantile plot, Boxplot, Violin plot
Geo location	Choroplet map, Cartogram
Part-to-whole	Bar plot, Stacked bars, Treemap, Waffle, Pie
Ranking	Bar plot, Dot plot, Lollypop
Time series	Line plot, Bar plot, Streamgraph

Anti-patterns

using truncated bars to exaggerate differences, compromising proportionality instead of using other representations (e.g. dot plots)
using pie charts for more than 5 categories and/or without direct labelling of the slices
using dual vertical scales that are difficult to read and lend themselves to ambiguity due to the arbitrary selection of axis ranges
using any 3D effect or decoration that may alter perception
using line plots to display unordered variables

Inter-Rater Reliability and Agreement ¹⁾

"The extent to which different raters assign the same precise value for each item being rated" (Inter-Rater Agreement; IRA) and "the extent to which raters can consistently distinguish between different items on a measurement scale" (Inter-Rater Reliability; IRR)²

Application

Applies to studies in which one or more human raters (also called judges or coders) rate (or measure, label, judge, rank or categorize) one or more properties of one or more research objects.³

Are multiple raters needed?

There is no universal rule to determine when two or more raters are necessary. The following factors should be considered:

Controversiality: the more potentially controversial the judgment, the more multiple raters are needed; e.g. recording the publication year of the primary studies in an SLR is less controversial than evaluating the elegance of a technical solution.
Practicality: the less practical it is to have multiple rates, the more reasonable a single-rater design becomes; e.g. multiple raters applying an a priori, deductive coding scheme to some artifacts is more practical than multiple raters inductively coding 2000 pages of interview transcripts.
Philosophy: having multiple raters is more important from a realist ontological perspective (characteristic of positivism and falsificationism) than from an idealist ontological perspective (characteristic of interpretivism and constructivism).

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

clearly states what properties were rated
clearly states how many raters rated each property

EITHER:

provides reasonable justification for using a single rater⁴

OR:

describes the process by which two or more raters independently rated properties of research objects; AND
describes how disagreements were resolved; AND
indicates the variable type (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio) of the ratings; AND
reports an appropriate statistical measure of IRR/IRA⁵

Desirable Attributes

provides supplementary materials including: rating scheme(s), decision rules, example disagreements, IRR/IRA broken down by property or wave of analysis.
justifies the statistic used⁶
reports established interpretations or thresholds for the statistics used
analyzes anomalous results⁷ in light of the properties of the statistic used (e.g. Cohen's kappa anomalies⁸)
describes the raters' training or experience in the research topic
resolves disagreements through discussion (rather than voting)

Extraordinary Attributes

employs more than three raters per property
reports an iterative process with multiple cycles of (i) rating a subset of the data, (ii) resolving disagreements, and (iii) updating the rating scheme or decision rules until a minimum threshold indicates acceptable reliability/agreement; reports IRR/IRA for each cycle in an iterative process
calculates IRR/IRA for internal quality of the research, i.e., as a tool for progressively improving the consistency of rating systems thus improving researchers' reflexivity

Antipatterns

Reporting IRR where IRA is more appropriate and vice versa.
Pretending that the IRR or IRA statistic indicates good reliability when it is below established thresholds.
Calculating multiple IRR/IRA measures and reporting only the most favourable (p-hacking)
Pretending that an obviously positivist study adopts an idealist ontology to avoid employing multiple raters

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Resolving disagreements using a tiebreaker instead of discussion because a rater was unavailable.
Supplementary materials do not include example disagreements because the data is sensitive.
There is no indication of the number of iterations performed to assess / improve the IRR / IRA.

Invalid Criticisms

Criticizing use of a single rater where multiple raters would be impractical or inconsistent with the study's underlying philosophy..
Criticizing use of a single rater when the data is such that there is no reason to suspect different raters would reach different conclusions.
Criticizing use of multiple raters. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which multiple raters would actively harm a study's credibility.
'IRR/IRA is too low' when there is no evidence-based threshold and reliability threats are clearly acknowledged.

Notes

IRR is a measure of correlation the can be calculated using (for example) Pearson's r, Kendall's tau or Spearman's rho
IRA is a measure of agreement and can be calculated using (for example) Scott's π, Cohen's κ, Fleiss's κ and Krippendorff's α (for example).
IRR/IRA analysis not only indicates reliability and objectivity (in positivist research) but also improves reflexivity (in anti-positivist research).

Exemplars

JESSICA DIAZ, DANIEL LÓPEZ-FERNÁNDEZ, JORGE PEREZ, ÁNGEL GONZÁLEZ-PRIETO (in press) Why are many businesses instilling a DevOps culture into their organization? _Empirical Software Engineering

JORGE PÉREZ, JESSICA DÍAZ, JAVIER GARCÍA-MARTÍN, AND BERNARDO TABUENCA. 2020. Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - enhancement of the study selection process using Cohen's Kappa statistic. Journal of Systems and Software, 168

JORGE PÉREZ, CARMEN VIZCARRO, JAVIER GARCÍA, AURELIO BERMÚDEZ, AND RUTH COBOS.2017. Development of Procedures to Assess Problem-Solving Competence in Computing Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Education, 60 (1), 22-28

R. MOHANANI, B. TURHAN, P. RALPH, (in press) Requirements framing affects design creativity. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2909033

ZAPF, A., CASTELL, S., MORAWIETZ, L., & KARCH, A. 2016. Measuring inter-rater reliability for nominal data–which coefficients and confidence intervals are appropriate? BMC medical research methodology, 16, article 93

¹ Assessing consistency among raters, where appropriate, promotes "systematicity, communicability and transparency of the coding process; reflexivity and dialogue within research teams; and helping to satisfy diverse audiences of the trustworthiness of the research" (O'Connor & Joffe 2020).
² See Gisev, Bell, & Chen (2013)
³ For example: (a) applying selection criteria in an SLR; (b) an experiment in which a dependent variable like code quality is scored by human; (c) deductive qualitative analysis with an a priori coding scheme in positivist case study.
⁴ e.g. the ratings are uncontroversial; multiple raters would be impractical; multiple raters are inconsistent with the philosophical perspective of the work
⁵ Such as Pearson's r, Kendall's tau, Spearman's rho, Cohen's Kappa, Fleiss Kappa, Krippendorff's Alpha or (rarely) percent agreement
⁶ E.g. is the absolute value for each item being rated (IRA) or the trend in ratings (IRR) important?
⁷ E.g. high value of the observed agreement, but low value of the statistic or vice versa
⁸ See FEINSTEIN, A. R., & CICCHETTI, D. V.1990. High Agreement But Low Kappa: I. the Problems of Two Paradoxes*. J Clin Epidemiol, 43(6), 543–549.

Open Science

The practice of maximizing the accessibility and transparency of science

Application

The open science supplement applies to all research.

Principle

Artifacts related to a study and the paper itself should, in principle, be made available on the Internet:

without any barrier (e.g. paywalls, registration forms, request mechanisms),
under an appropriate open license that specifies purposes for re-use and re-purposing,
properly archived and preserved,

provided that there are no ethical, legal, technical, economical, or practical barriers preventing their disclosure.

Specific Attributes

Desirable Attributes

includes a section named data availability (typically after conclusion)
EITHER: links to supplementary materials
OR explains why materials cannot be released (reasons for limited disclosure of data should be trusted)
includes supplementary materials such as: raw, deidentified or transformed data, extended proofs, analysis scripts, software, virtual machines and containers, or qualitative codebooks.
archives supplementary materials on preserved digital repositories such as zenodo.org, figshare.com, softwareheritage.org, osf.io, or institutional repositories
releases supplementary material under a clearly-identified open license such as CC0 or CC-BY 4.0

General Criteria

Rather than evaluating reproducibility or replicability in principle, reviewers should focus on the extent to which artifacts that can be released, are released.

Invalid Criticisms

Researchers should not complain that a study involves artifacts which— for good reasons—cannot be released.

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

dataset is not released because it cannot be safely deidentified (e.g. interview transcripts; videos of participants)
source code is not released because it is closed-source and belongs to industry partner

Notes

authors are encouraged to self-archive their pre- and post-prints in open and preserved repositories
open science is challenging for qualitative studies; reviewers should welcome qualitative studies which open their artifacts even in a limited way
personal or institutional websites, version control systems (e.g. GitHub), consumer cloud storage (e.g. Dropbox), and commercial paper repositories (e.g. ResearchGate; Academia.edu) do not offer properly archived and preserved data.

Registered Reports

An empirical study that is published in two phases: the plan (RR1) and the results of executing the plan (RR2)

Definition

"Registered reports" refers to studies that are conducted in two phases:

researchers create and publish a study plan, or phase 1 registered report (RR1), which is accepted in principle by a publishing venue;
researchers execute the plan and write up the results, or a phase 2 registered report (RR2), which then receives final acceptance from the same publishing venue.

Pre-registration refers to depositing the RR1 somewhere publicly visible. Pre-registration aims to prevent hypothesising after results are known, to mitigate unconscious researcher bias in data analysis, and combat publication bias.

Application

This standard applies to positivist, confirmatory (i.e. hypothesis-testing) studies with tightly-scoped analysis approaches. Pre-registering interpretivist, qualitative or exploratory research remains controversial.

Specific Attributes (RR1)

Essential Attributes

meets all essential criteria in The General Standard except those that require data:
- does not present results
- does not validate assumptions of statistical tests
- does not discuss implications
- does not contribute to collective body of knowledge
- does not support conclusions with evidence or arguments
meets all essential criteria, in applicable empirical standards, that can be met before data collection¹
justifies importance of the purpose, problem, objective, or research question(s)
describes the research method in detail sufficient for an independent researcher to exactly replicate the proposed data collection and analysis procedures
the stated hypotheses can be tested with the data the researchers propose to collect

Desirable Attributes

presents preliminary data (e.g. from a pilot study) to justify the chosen approach (e.g. probability distributions).
includes a conditional structure (e.g. pre-specifying different tests for normal and non-normal distributions)
explains how the study will change based on the results of data analysis (i.e. conditional analysis)²

Specific Attributes (RR2)³

Essential Attributes

meets all essential criteria in The General Standard (no exceptions)
introduction, rationale and stated hypotheses are the same as the approved RR1 submission except for improvements based on feedback from RR1 reviews
EITHER: adheres precisely to the registered procedures
OR: thoroughly justifies all deviations and explains how they affect the final analysis.
deviations, if any, are not justified based on the data
clearly designates as exploratory any unregistered post hoc analyses
unregistered post hoc analysis, if any, are justified, methodologically sound, and informative

Desirable Attributes

provides evidence that data was collected after RR1 plan is accepted

Extraordinary Attributes

generates novel insights into the concept, process benefits, or limitations of registered reports

Antipatterns

deviating from the RR1 plan because it constrains exploratory research, when the plan did not mention exploration
postdictive deviations from RR1 plan; i.e., changes made knowing how they would affect the outcome of the study
Pre-registrations that are not verifiably committed prior to data collection, e.g. not time-stamped.

Invalid Criticisms

RR1: Insisting on complete data collection or detailed analysis and results
RR1: Rejecting exploratory or qualitative research: all kinds of research can be pre-registered even it's not covered here
RR2: in hindsight, the RR1 plan was not appropriate (RR2 reviews should not criticize any aspect of the RR1 plan)
RR2: results are not statistically significant, novel, relevant or compelling; effect sizes too small

Justifying Deviations

Reviewers should not expect research to go exactly according to plan or authors to foresee every possible problem. Changes are acceptable as long as they are justified and not postdictive (i.e. changes made knowing how they will affect results). For example, researchers might drop a mistranslated question in a multi-lingual questionnaire survey.

Sampling

An empirical study where some of many possible items are selected

Application

This standard applies to empirical research in which the researcher selects smaller groups of items to study (a sample) from a larger group of items of interest (the population) using a usually imperfect population list (the sampling frame). Common items in software engineering research include people (e.g. software developers), code artifacts (e.g. source code files) nd non-code artifacts (e.g. online discussions, user stories).

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

explains the goal of sampling (e.g. aiming for representativeness, identifying exceptional cases)
explains the sampling strategy, in particular the different filtering steps involved or the reasons for selecting certain objects
explains why the sampling strategy is reasonable (not necessarily optimal) for the sampling goal
explains the reasoning behind the selection of study objects (especially qualitative studies)
reports the sample size

Essential only if representativeness is a goal

states the theoretical population (what would the researcher like to generalize to?)
presents a replicable, concise, algorithmic account of how other researchers could derive the same sample
explicitly argues for representativeness (e.g. compares sample and population parameters, provides confidence interval and confidence level for sample size)
explains how the sample could be biased along the sampling steps

Desirable Attributes

reports the approximate or exact sizes of populations and sampling frames
provides the sample, sampling frame, and sampling scripts as supplementary material (subject to the collected data containing sensitive or protected information).
uses more sophisticated sampling strategies where appropriate, e.g.:
- exploratory research: using purposive rather than convenience sampling for unit of analysis
- case study: using purposive rather than convenience sampling for site selection
- repository mining: using probability rather than convenience or purposive sampling (if a sampling frame is available)
- online survey: using respondent-driven rather than snowball sampling
- study with identifiable strata: using stratified random rather than simple random sampling
- theory building: using theoretical rather than convenience sampling

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

omitting a detailed account of the sampling strategy because it is explained in previous work using the same data set
using a very simple sampling strategy in exceptional circumstances where expediency outweighs representativeness (e.g. research during a disaster)

Antipatterns

making claims about a population, based on sample, without providing an argument for representativeness
claiming that a sample is representative of a population because it was randomly selected from a sampling frame, without considering bias in the sampling frame
conducting underpowered research; i.e.:
- quantitative research with a sample size insufficient to detect effects of the expected size¹
- qualitative research with too little data for plausible saturation
justifying the selection of items merely by stating that they come from a "real-world" context, without providing additional reasoning why the selected items are suitable for the study context

Invalid Criticisms

complaining about lack of representativeness or low external validity in studies where representativeness is not a goal
abstractly criticizing generalizability rather than pointing to best practices, e.g.:
invalid: 'as most respondents work in app development, the results may not generalize to other settings'
valid: 'the researchers should have sent participation reminders to mitigate response bias'
for qualitative research, claiming that the sample size is too small without considering how the items were selected (e.g. theoretical sampling) or the authors' argument for saturation.

Ethics (Engineering Research)

Application

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

Desirable Attributes

Extraordinary Attributes

General Quality Criteria

Antipatterns

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Invalid Criticisms

Suggested Readings

Ethics (Studies with Human Participants)

Application

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

Desirable Attributes

Extraordinary Attributes

General Quality Criteria

Antipatterns

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Invalid Criticisms

Note

Suggested Readings

Ethics (Studies with Secondary Human Data)

Application

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

Desirable Attributes

Extraordinary Attributes

General Quality Criteria

Antipatterns

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Invalid Criticisms

Note

Suggested Readings

Information Visualization

Application

Attributes

Table 1: When to use which visualization

Anti-patterns

Suggested Readings

Inter-Rater Reliability and Agreement 1)

Application

Are multiple raters needed?

Specific Attributes

Essential Attributes

Desirable Attributes

Extraordinary Attributes

Antipatterns

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Invalid Criticisms

Notes

Suggested Readings

Exemplars

Open Science

Application

Principle

Specific Attributes

Desirable Attributes

General Criteria

Invalid Criticisms

Examples of Acceptable Deviations

Notes

Suggested Readings

Registered Reports

Definition

Application

Specific Attributes (RR1)

Essential Attributes

Desirable Attributes

Specific Attributes (RR2)3

Essential Attributes

Desirable Attributes

Extraordinary Attributes

Antipatterns

Invalid Criticisms

Justifying Deviations

Suggested Readings

Sampling

Application

Inter-Rater Reliability and Agreement ¹⁾

Specific Attributes (RR2)³