Abstract
The modeling field is rapidly evolving and expanding to address new research topics and to connect with new disciplines. As such, what constituted a good modeling research contribution ten years ago may not be the same today. We try to distill some insights of what we (and the community we aim to represent) consider today as key elements of a good research paper in the field of software and systems modeling. Such insights—which will need to evolve and adapt with time—will be useful not just for authors of new papers, but also for reviewers and editors.
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Notes
There is even an IEEE transactions journal devoted to professional writing and communication https://procomm.ieee.org/transactions-of-professional-communication/.
There are many ways to validate a proposal: formal proofs, convincing use cases or the many types of empirical validations (questionnaires, surveys, controlled experiments, semi-structured interviews,...). Just keep in mind that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as Carl Sagan famously stated.
Hint: there is no need to mention the growing popularity of model-driven engineering or all its benefits such as platform-independence; your typical SOSYM reader knows these things already—it is advisable to get to the meat of the contribution as quickly as possible!.
Hint: do not even think about using a class-to-table example to illustrate your model to model or model to text language; while we are being slightly facetious, the serious point is that (a) the example has been done to death; and (b) it is almost always done incorrectly!.
For these same reasons, we do not consider machine learning models as good modeling contributions. As (mostly) black boxes, ML models do not bring new insights into the field and science of modeling.
Hint: there is no need for more petri nets metamodels.
In fact, the Science of Computer Programming journal recently published a special issue on “tools and demonstrations in model-driven engineering” covering tools accepted in the Models conference tool track.
We believe starting a reflection on the name of the journal itself would be worthwhile. At the very least, we should clarify that by “systems” we mean all types of systems, including biological and mechanical ones, and not just software-based ones.
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Communicated by Bernhard Rumpe.
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