Technical papers can be short papers (4 pages plus 1 additional page for references) and full papers (10 pages plus 2 additional pages for references).

Research Papers
Short research papers should discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Accepted short papers will present their ideas in a short lightning talk. Full research papers are expected to describe new research results, and have a higher degree of technical rigor than short papers.

Practice Experiences
MSR encourages the submission of papers on practice experiences. They should report experiences of applying mining repository algorithms in an industry/open source organization context. They aim at reporting positive or negative experiences of applying known algorithms, but adapting existing algorithms or proposing new algorithms for practical use would be plus.

Reusable Tools
MSR wants to promote and recognize the creation and use of tools that are designed and built not only for a specific research project, but for the MSR community as a whole. Those tools may let researchers focus on specific aspects of research, let their work be more reproducible, lower the barriers to reuse previous research efforts. Therefore, MSR encourages the submission of papers about these tools. These papers can be descriptions of tools built by the authors, that can be used by other researchers, and/or descriptions of use of tools built by others to obtain some specific research results in the area of mining software repositories.

The public availability of the tool and its internal details, its usefulness for other researchers, the measures taken to simplify its installation and use, and the availability of documentation about it should be clearly discussed in the paper. Both long papers, for complete descriptions of mature tools and/or use cases, and short papers, for summaries of promising use cases and tools, will be accepted. The papers will be reviewed both on their academic merits, and on the specific usefulness of the tools, and the experiences described, for the whole MSR community.

Submission and Review of Technical Papers
All technical papers, including those describing practical experiences or tools, will face the same level of review and scrutiny. To take their peculiarities into account, if you consider a paper qualifies as practice or tool paper, specify that using the corresponding option when submitting. Submissions should follow ACM formatting guidelines. Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere for the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policies and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission.

Papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair.

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete an ACM Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera ready versions. At least one author of each paper is expected to present the results at the MSR 2018 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the conference electronic proceedings.

A selection of the best papers will be invited to EMSE Special Issue. All accepted technical papers in 2018 have a chance to win the "MSR FOSS Impact Paper Award“.

Double-blind Submission Guideline
MSR 2018 will conduct double-blind reviewing. All submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission. They should also ensure that any citations to related work by themselves are written in the third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” as opposed to “our prior work”. Authors having further questions on double-blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the Program Co-Chairs by email.