PEPM 2009
Savannah, Georgia, USA, January 19-20, 2009 (Associated with POPL 2009)
PEPM'09
Savannah, Georgia, USA, January 19-20, 2009

Advice on Writing a PEPM Research Paper

ACM SIGPLAN 2009 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

The PEPM Symposium/Workshop series aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the areas of program transformation and generation. For PEPM 2006, the program chairs have written up advice for authors of PEPM research paper submissions and tool demonstration paper submissions. Advice for research papers is contained in this document; advice for tool demo papers can be found at this link.

The scope of topics to be covered by PEPM is already discussed in the Call For Papers and will not be addressed further in this document. Please contact the program chairs if you have remaining questions about the scope of PEPM.

Program Goals

The primary goal of the PEPM Program Committee will be to assemble a program that presents well-grounded and relevant contributions and that generate forward-looking discussions that serve to create and drive a dynamic research agenda that can significantly impact software engineering practice. The Committee will aim to arrive at papers, tool presentations, and discussions that collectively address the following questions:

Program Committee Expectations

Below we provide guidelines and suggestions that PEPM authors should take into account when preparing submissions. Although there's a fair amount of material below, we want to emphasize that we are mindful of the fact that PEPM is a workshop this year and we don't expect perfect papers!! -- even though we hope each author will do their best to put together a solid submission. In other words, the advice below is meant to inspire you and give you ideas for improving your submission -- it's not meant to scare you.

Original Work

All papers should be original work, and not have been previously published nor have been submitted to, or be in consideration for, any journal, book, conference, or workshop. Note that PEPM Tool Demonstration Papers have less restrictive conditions on novelty.

Commendable Qualities

You might also find this advice on how to structure a research paper helpful. It is also a good idea to have your paper reviewed by colleagues before submitting.

Common Flaws

When considering how to write a contribution that helps us meet the goals above, it is worthwhile to consider common flaws in unsuccessful submissions or papers that failed to have an impact on advancing the agenda of the community.

Example Paper Types

What About Work In Progress?

Due to the workshop format adopted for PEPM this year, we do encourage submissions of "work in progress" in cases where the submission raises issues that will generate interesting discussions at the meeting, brings new knowledge of a particular application domain or technique to the community, or lays out challenging open problems of high relevance to software engineering practice. Depending on the quality and number of such submissions, we may collect work-in-progress papers into a single session with slightly shorter time slots for each presentation and a longer discussion time at the end of the session.