The coverage and content of ICSE papers and its peer review process suffer from several issues, which we discuss in this paper. We suggest a scoring scheme and some other methods that could result in improvements. First, we suggest that several of the main tracks at ICSE should be merged; the most important reason for this is that calling one track the ‘Research’ track, and the others by different names, implies the other tracks do not involve research results or rigor. Secondly, we suggest actively focusing on encouraging more coverage of under-represented topics such as requirements, design, user experience and process, by having reviewers separately score interestingness and potential impact, as well as undertaking light affirmative action towards papers in such topics. Thirdly, we suggest actively encouraging conciseness, so papers are faster to review and are more likely to be read, by slightly increasing the acceptance probability of papers that are considerably shorter than the page limit. Beyond this, we also suggest relaxing the current double-blind standard to overcome certain difficulties, and providing discounts for to the conference for those who work so hard preparing reviews. The ideas presented in this paper were derived in part from the FOSE community survey, where many respondents expressed concerns about peer review, and also by the experiences of the author as general chair of ICSE 2025.

@inproceedings{paperbot12648,
  title = {Adjusting The ICSE Review Process to Encourage Topic Diversity, Conciseness and Interestingness},
  author = {Timothy Lethbridge},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3793657.3793875}
}