MSR 2026: Call for Papers

The International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is the premier conference for data science (DS), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) in software engineering.

The 23rd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories will be held on April 13-14, 2026, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, co-located with ICSE 2026.

Evaluation Criteria

We invite both full (maximum ten pages, plus two additional pages of references) as well as short (four pages, plus references) papers to the Research Track.

Submissions will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

• Soundness: How well the paper’s contributions address the research questions posed and are backed by a thorough application of relevant research procedures.
• Relevance: The extent to which the paper successfully argues or illustrates that its contributions help bridge a significant knowledge gap or tackle a crucial practical issue within the field of software engineering.
• Novelty: How original the paper’s contributions are in comparison to existing knowledge or how significantly they contribute to the current body of knowledge.
• Presentation: How well-structured and clear the paper’s argumentation is, how clearly the contributions are articulated, the legibility of figures and tables, and the adequacy of English language usage.
• Replicability: The extent to which the paper’s claims can be independently verified through available replication packages and/or sufficient information included in the paper.

All submissions are expected to adhere to the Open Science policy.

Junior PC

MSR 2026 will integrate the junior reviewers into the Technical track program committee!

The primary audience for the Junior PC is early-career researchers (PhD students, postdocs, new faculty members, and industry practitioners) who are keen to get more involved in the academic peer-review process but have not yet served on a technical research track program committee at big international SE conferences (e.g., ICSE, ESEC/FSE, ASE, MSR, ICSME, SANER).

All submissions to the MSR research track will be reviewed jointly by both regular and junior PC members, as part of the same process. We expect that each paper will receive three reviews from PC members. The final decisions will be made by consensus among all reviewers.

Submission Process

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform to the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options.

Submissions to the Technical Track can be made via the submission site.

All submissions must adhere to the following requirements:

• All submissions must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted.
• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions.
• Papers submitted to MSR 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for MSR 2026.
• If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.
• Authors will be asked to fill out a copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing the camera-ready version of their papers.

Open Science Policy

The MSR conference actively supports the adoption of open science principles. We expect all contributing authors to disclose:

• The source code of relevant software.
• The data used in the paper.
• Instructions for other researchers describing how to reproduce or replicate the results.

Submission Link

Papers must be submitted through HotCRP: https://msr2026.hotcrp.com

Important Dates

• Abstract Deadline: October 20, 2025 AoE
• Paper Deadline: October 23, 2025 AoE
• Author Response Period: December 8 – 11, 2025 AoE
• Author Notification: January 07, 2026 AoE
• Camera Ready Deadline: January 26, 2026 AoE