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

Tool Paper Evaluation Criteria

ACM SIGPLAN 2009 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

PEPM has a special category of papers called tool demo papers. The main purpose of a tool paper is to display other researchers in the PEPM community a completed, robust and well-documented tool -- highlighting the overall functionality of the tool, the interfaces of the tool, interesting examples and applications of the tool, an assessment of the tool's strengths and weaknesses, and a summary of documentation/support available with the tool.

Tool demo paper submissions must satisfy the following requirements.

Because tool papers have a different format and a different purpose than regular research papers, we would like to (a) describe in more detail the characteristics of a good tool paper, and (b) give the explicit evaluation criteria that will be used by the PEPM program committee when selecting tool papers.

Regular research papers may also describe the details of a particular tool, but note that there are important differences between the contents of a tool demo paper and a research paper that describes a tool. Research papers about tools clearly describe how aspects of the tool (e.g., its architecture, underlying algorithms, combinations of techniques, functionality, etc.) advance the state of the art. This should include a detailed comparison with related work. Moreover, research papers about tools should usually include the results/data of experimental studies that rigorously demonstrate the effectiveness of the claimed scientific advance. On the other hand, the main purpose of a tool demo paper is not to rigorously justify the scientific advances of the tool (although the tool demo paper may contain a concise list of advances or references to other research papers). Rather, a tool demo paper should simply provide concise summary of the current state of a tool and describe how researchers in the PEPM community might apply it effectively.

Below we list the explicit evaluation criteria that will be used by the PEPM committee when selecting tool papers.

Authors with further questions about the structure, contents, or suitability of a potential tool demo paper should contact the program chairs.