--- name: fse-supplementary description: 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. --- # 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 | Content | Body (within page budget) | Artifact / appendix | |---|---|---| | Research questions and their answers | Yes | — | | Core technique or study design | Yes | Full parameter grids, extra config | | The headline results and their threats | Yes | Full result tables, secondary plots | | Statistical tests behind a claim | The result + test named | The computation notebook | | Subject-system list | Summary + selection criterion | The complete list | | Raw data, logs, scripts | — | Yes | | Reproduction instructions | A pointer | The 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 ```text [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 ```text [Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready [Partition check] anything decision-critical outside the body? [Page budget] body within limit? appendices counted correctly? yes/no [Anonymity] archive clean of identity + metadata? passed/issues [Body dependency] ```