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fse-supplementary

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Use when deciding what belongs in an ESEC/FSE paper body versus its anonymized artifact and appendices, covering the ACM-template page budget, the rule that decision-critical evidence stays inside the reviewed pages, double-anonymous supplementary material, and how to split an empirical-SE paper between body and package.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/FSE-Skills/skills/fse-supplementary/SKILL.md

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FSE Supplementary

Use this when assembling FSE supplementary material. The governing rule is simple and strict: the paper must be judgeable from the reviewed pages alone. The artifact and any appendix support the paper; they do not hold the argument. Reviewers read the artifact at their discretion, so anything the decision depends on lives in the body.

What goes where

ContentBody (within page budget)Artifact / appendix
Research questions and their answersYes—
Core technique or study designYesFull parameter grids, extra config
The headline results and their threatsYesFull result tables, secondary plots
Statistical tests behind a claimThe result + test namedThe computation notebook
Subject-system listSummary + selection criterionThe complete list
Raw data, logs, scripts—Yes
Reproduction instructionsA pointerThe README and run scripts

If a reviewer would need to open the artifact to know whether to accept, the paper is mis-partitioned — move that evidence into the body.

The page-budget discipline

FSE's ACM-template budget (FSE 2027: ≤18 pages of text and figures, plus reference pages) is generous compared with a two-column conference limit, but it is finite and counts figures, tables, and any in-paper appendix. Consequences:

  • You can usually keep a full threats-to-validity treatment and the primary result tables in the body — do so; they are decision-critical.
  • Long protocol tables, per-subject breakdowns, and additional RQ variants go to the artifact with explicit forward references.
  • Do not use the artifact to smuggle in a result that would not fit — an argument that only closes with material outside the reviewed pages reads as unreviewable.

Double-anonymous supplementary rules

[No identity]   no authors, affiliations, acknowledgements, grants, cluster paths, or repo owners
                anywhere in the archive or appendix
[Anonymized links] the Data Availability link points at an anonymizing host, not a personal repo
[Clean archive]  no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or large irrelevant files
[Opens clean]    verify the archive unzips and the README orients a reader in one minute on a
                fresh machine

Appendix architecture (when the template allows in-paper appendices)

  • Order appendix sections to mirror the RQ order; reviewers navigate by RQ, not page number.
  • Keep each appendix section referenced from the body at least once — orphaned material is invisible under discretionary review.
  • Confirm on the current call whether appendices count against the page budget or attach separately; this varies and changes the split.

Vignette: splitting a mixed-methods paper

A paper mining pull requests plus interviewing developers: the body keeps the RQs, the study design, the headline quantitative results with effect sizes, the key qualitative themes, and a threats subsection; the artifact holds the mining scripts with pinned SHAs, the extracted dataset, the full codebook with inter-rater agreement, the interview protocol, and the analysis notebooks. Nothing decision-critical lives only in the artifact, because artifact inspection is discretionary and the reviewers judge from the pages.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page budget] body within limit? appendices counted correctly? yes/no
[Anonymity] archive clean of identity + metadata? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the artifact>