Research Track

The Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES), promoted annually by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), is the premier software engineering event in Latin America. SBES is held in conjunction with the Brazilian Congress on Software: Theory and Practice (CBSoft).

Call for Papers

The SBES Research Track is the primary track of the symposium, featuring solid contributions rigorously evaluated by the Program Committee, which considers criteria including originality, relevance, rigor, verifiability and transparency, and the quality of the work's presentation.

Important Dates

Topics of Interest

Submissions related to (but not limited to) the following topics will be accepted:

• API Development and Evolution
• Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering
• Clone Detection and Refactoring
• Configuration Management
• Continuous Software Engineering
• Distributed and Collaborative Software Engineering
• Economic, Human, and Social Aspects of Software Engineering
• Ethics in Software Engineering
• Experimental Software Engineering
• Mobile Application Development
• Model-Driven Software Engineering
• Open Science in Software Engineering Research
• Requirements Engineering
• Search-Based Software Engineering
• Service Orientation and Microservices
• Software Architecture
• Software Ecosystems
• Software Engineering and Data Science
• Software Engineering for Artificial Intelligence
• Software Engineering for Cloud Computing
• Software Maintenance, Reengineering, and Evolution
• Software Processes (including Agile)
• Software Project Management
• Software Quality (including Privacy and Security in Software Systems)
• Software Repository Mining
• Software Reuse
• Software Sustainability
• Software Testing
• Software Validation and Verification
• Software Visualization
• Startups and Software Economics
• Systems of Systems
• Technical Debt Management
• Variability and Software Product Lines

Open Science Policies

SBES 2025 encourages authors to adopt Open Science principles and practices, seeking to promote transparency, replicability, and reproducibility in research. We encourage all contributing authors to disclose data/artifacts (anonymized and curated) to increase reproducibility and replicability. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, as in industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges when sharing research data.

In this context, following international events in the area, when submitting to the research track, authors must create an unnumbered section entitled "Artifacts Availability" after the "Conclusion" section and:

• Make your artifact available to the Program Committee (via upload of supplementary material or a link to an anonymous repository) and provide instructions on how to access this data in that section of the paper; or
• Include in the paper an explicit statement about why this is not possible or desirable; or
• Indicate why you do not intend to make the data or study materials publicly available after the paper acceptance, if applicable. The standard understanding is that data and/or other artifacts will be publicly available after an article is accepted.

The document "SBES 2026 – Open Science Policies" provides principles and practices to support authors in the SBES Research Track. During article preparation, questions may be forwarded to the SBES 2026 Open Science chairs, without compromising article anonymity.

On the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) or AI-assisted technologies in Research Papers

By submitting papers to SBES 2026, authors acknowledge compliance with the generative AI usage policy, based on existing policies proposed by IEEE, ACM, and Springer.

It is prohibited to:

• List generative AI tools and technologies (such as ChatGPT) as authors of papers.
• Use articles or sections entirely produced by generative AI tools.

It is allowed to -- with explicit mention in the acknowledgments:

• Use generative AI tools to create parts of the content, with a disclosure in the acknowledgments indicating what was generated and which tool was used. Authors must check the tool’s terms of use. Example: "ChatGPT was used to generate the first paragraph of Section 3 and Table 3.2."

It is allowed to -- without mention in the paper:

• Use AI or AI-assisted technologies to improve image quality (contrast and clarity); and
• Use generative AI tools to edit and improve the quality of existing text (similarly to grammar assistants such as Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement).

Paper Preparation and Submission

Authors must submit original work that has not been published elsewhere nor is under review. Papers for the SBES 2026 Research Track may be written in Portuguese or English, with English papers offering greater international visibility.

Papers must be submitted in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) format and strictly follow the 2-column ACM_SigConf format, available at: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. LaTeX users must use the acmart.cls class provided in the template with the conference format enabled at the document preamble:

\documentclass[sigconf,anonymous]{acmart}

Additionally, some sections must be removed from the standard ACM template using:

\setcopyright{none}
\settopmatter{printccs=false}
\settopmatter{printacmref=false}
\renewcommand\footnotetextcopyrightpermission[1]{} 

Authors must use the ACM-Reference-Format.bst bibliography style also provided in the template:

\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}

After the Conclusion section, authors must include an unnumbered section titled "Artifacts Availability":

\section*{Artifacts Availability}

Papers must have a maximum of 10 pages, including all figures, tables, and acknowledgments, and 2 additional pages for bibliographic references. Papers must be registered and submitted through the JEMS3 system.

• Abstract submission: Authors must provide the paper title, authors, abstract, associated topic(s), and the language.
• Full paper submission: Authors must upload a PDF file containing the paper.

Publication of accepted papers requires at least one author to register for CBSoft 2026 (according to the event’s registration rules), and present the paper in person during SBES 2026. Papers not presented will not appear in the proceedings.

Anonimization

The SBES 2026 Research Track adopts a double-anonymous review process. All submitted papers should conceal the identity of the authors. Both author names and affiliations must be omitted. In addition, the following rules should be addressed:

• Citations to own related work must be written in the third person. For example, one must write "the previous work of Silva et al." as opposed to "our previous work." Terms that can identify the authors, such as "we", "our", "ours", "GitHub", and "funding", must be avoided and should be removed before submission.
• Papers should not mention any artifact in repositories or websites that can identify the authorship. If any artifact needs to be made available, it should be anonymized in the repository/website. For using GitHub, we recommend the "anonymous" service (https://anonymous.4open.science/);
• If the submitted paper is a follow-up of a previous work, the reference may be anonymized in the submitted paper. For example, "the previous work of Silva et al." can be adapted to "based on the previous work [Ref]" and the reference at the end of the paper can be presented as "[Ref] Anonymous authors. Omitted due to double-blind review.";
• Reviewers will not be encouraged to search for references in other online sources that identify the authors. Searches in digital libraries or existing artifacts do not break the double-anonymous policy.

After paper acceptance, all the paper information (without anonymization) must be included in the camera-ready version. Any questions regarding paper preparation in accordance with the double-blind rules can be directed to the Program Committee Chairs.

Any questions about paper preparation following the double-anonymous rules can be sent to the Program Committee Chairs.

Desk Rejection

Submissions that fall outside the scope of the SBES 2026 Research Track or do not comply with the required format and anonymization rules will be rejected without review.

If a previous publication of the paper or simultaneous submission for a refereed venue (event or journal) is identified, the paper will be rejected at any time, and authors may be prevented from submitting papers in future SBES editions. Additionally, the organizers of the other venue will be informed about the fact.

If evidence is found that generative AI tools were used in the submission in ways that do not comply with the guidelines for the use of generative AI in this call, the paper will be rejected without review, and the authors may be prevented from submitting papers in future SBES editions.

Paper Review

Papers meeting all the submission requirements will be reviewed by at least three Program Committee members, according to the following criteria:

• Originality: Novelty and innovation of the paper in relation to the state of the art, including proposed approaches, solutions, problem formulations, methodologies, theories, or evaluations.
• Relevance: Importance of the paper’s contributions to the Software Engineering field.
• Rigor: Soundness, clarity, and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, as well as the level of detail and completeness of the method and evaluation.
• Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper provides sufficient information to assess and reproduce the methods, data, analyses, and results presented, including the adequacy and completeness of research artifacts, when provided.
• Presentation: Quality of the paper’s writing, including clear descriptions, grammatical correctness, absence of ambiguities, legibility of figures and tables, and compliance with formatting instructions.

Authors' Response (Rebuttal)

During the review process, authors may respond to reviewers before the final acceptance/rejection decision. The rebuttal should be a simple text of up to 7,000 characters (including spaces). Doubts may be sent via email to the Program Committee chairs.

Early Decisions

To reduce unnecessary effort in writing/reading rebuttals, SBES 2026 will send early decisions.

If reviewers and PC chairs determine that a paper can be accepted without additional clarification, the authors will receive an early acceptance notification at the beginning of the rebuttal period.

On the other hand, if reviewers and PC chairs consider the paper seriously deficient, leading them to conclude that the authors’ response is unlikely to change the evaluation, or if the article requires a complete rewrite, the authors will receive an early rejection at the beginning of the rebuttal period.

All other papers will proceed to the rebuttal phase.

Distinguished Paper Award

SBES 2026 will award the best papers of the Research Track. Winners will be announced at the opening of CBSoft, and authors will be invited to submit an extended version in English to the Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development (JSERD).

Outstanding Reviewer Award

The SBES Research Track recognizes the generosity of the Program Committee members who dedicate their time and effort to reviewing the submitted papers. A Distinguished Reviewer certificate will be awarded to reviewers who stand out from their peers in terms of timeliness, adherence to the evaluation criteria in their reviews, technical quality of the reviews, and active participation in discussions involving the Program Committee.

Journal-First Submissions

Authors of papers accepted in journals and related to SBES topics of interest are invited to present their work at SBES 2026. This provides authors with the opportunity to discuss their work with the community and also enriches the technical and scientific program of SBES 2026. Papers published in the following journals may be submitted: IEEE Software (IEEE SW), Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development (JSERD), Information and Software Technology (IST), Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), Software Quality Journal (SQJ), and Journal of Software: Evolution and Process (JSEP).

The following evaluation criteria will be adopted for the selection of papers submitted as Journal-First:

• The paper describes original results that are not extensions of previous conference papers;
• The paper was accepted for publication on or after January 1, 2025;
• The paper was not accepted for presentation at another conference in the Journal-First category;
• The paper is a research paper or a literature review (systematic literature review or systematic mapping study) that addresses topics of interest listed for the SBES 2026 Research Track and was peer-reviewed.

The submission of journal-first papers should be done by July 13, 2026, through the following link: https://forms.gle/GjV38XoPXpnncJGG7.

Organization

Program Committee Coordinators – Research Track

Ivan Machado (UFBA)

Monalessa Barcellos (UFES)

Program Committee

in formation

Research Track