New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER)ICSE 2026

Call for Papers

The New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) track at ICSE provides a vibrant forum for forward-looking, innovative research in software engineering. Our aim is to accelerate the exposure of the software engineering community to early yet potentially ground-breaking research results, and to techniques and perspectives that challenge the status quo in the discipline.

Scope

NIER invites innovative, groundbreaking new ideas supported by promising initial results, such as:

• Forward-looking ideas: exciting new directions or techniques that may have yet to be supported by solid experimental results, but are nonetheless supported by strong and well-argued scientific intuitions or preliminary results as well as concrete plans going forward.

• Thought-provoking reflections: bold and unexpected results and reflections that can help us look at current research directions under a new light, calling for new directions for future research.

A NIER track paper is not just a scaled-down version of an ICSE full research track paper. The NIER track is reserved for first-class, top-quality technical contributions. Therefore, a NIER submission is neither an ICSE full research track submission with weaker or no evaluation nor an op-ed piece advertising existing and already published results. Authors of such submissions should instead consider submitting to one of the many satellite events of ICSE.

Evaluation Criteria

Each submission will be reviewed and evaluated in terms of the following quality criteria:

• Impact: The significance and potential impact of the research. The potential of the research to disrupt the current practice.
• Novelty: The novelty and innovativeness of contributed solutions, problem formulations, methodologies, and/or theories, i.e., the extent to which the paper is sufficiently original with respect to the state of the art.
• Relevance: The relevance of the research to the field of software engineering.
• Clarity: The soundness, clarity, and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, as well as the level of thoroughness and completeness in defining future plans for completing the research.
• Presentation: The quality of the exposition in the paper.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of the above criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all.

Submission Instructions

IMPORTANT: Starting 2026, all articles published by ACM will be made Open Access. This is greatly beneficial to the advancement of computer science and leads to increased usage and citation of research.

• Many institutions (https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants) already joined the ACM Open access which means that authors from these institutions can publish in ACM free of charge.

• All others are expected to pay Article Processing Charges (APC) when they submit camera-ready versions of their accepted manuscripts. To facilitate the transition to Open access, for 2026 only, ACM SIGSOFT will cover APC costs for accepted NIER track papers if the authors are not covered by institutional open access agreements.

All submissions to the ICSE 2026 NIER track must conform to the following instructions:

• The submissions must not exceed 4 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. An extra page is allowed for references only. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after the paper is accepted).

• Each submission to the ICSE 2026 NIER track needs to include a section titled “Future Plans” where the authors outline the work they plan on doing to turn their new ideas and emerging results into a full-length paper in the future.

• All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, 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 for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:
  \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}

Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

• The ICSE 2026 NIER track will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:
  • Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.
  • All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
  • While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to ICSE 2026.

  Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found on the Q&A page.
  
  

Submission Policies

• By submitting to the ICSE NIER track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to ICSE 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2026. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

• If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Upon submitting, authors will declare their compliance with such a policy. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

• Submissions must follow the latest IEEE Submission and Peer Review Policy and ACM Policy on Authorship (with associated FAQ, which includes a policy regarding the use of generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT.

• The ICSE 2026 NIER track is aligned with the ICSE 2026 Open Science policies. The guiding principle is that, wherever relevant, all research results, artifacts, and data should be accessible to the public. For additional guidelines, see the Open Science Policy of the Research Track and the Q&A page.
  
  

Submission Process

Submissions shall be made through NIER submission site https://icse2026-nier.hotcrp.com/ by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with the submission instructions may be desk rejected without further review.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM and IEEE have been involved in ORCID and may collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. We are committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Important Dates

• Submissions Deadline: September 29, 2025
• Acceptance Notification: December 1, 2025
• Camera Ready: January 5, 2026

All dates are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12h).

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2026 and present the paper. We are assuming that the conference will be in-person, but if it is virtual or hybrid, virtual presentations may be possible. These matters will be discussed with the authors closer to the date of the conference.