icse-writing-style
Use when writing or revising an ICSE research-track paper, covering empirical-SE paper anatomy, research questions as the load-bearing structure, the threats-to-validity section the community expects, practitioner-grounded motivation, calibrated claims, and fitting a complete study into ten IEEE pages.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill icse-writing-style --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# ICSE Writing Style ICSE prose is judged by empiricists. The reviewer pool's shared training — controlled experiments, mining studies, qualitative methods — produces a house reading style: they locate the research questions, check that the design answers them, and read the threats-to-validity section as a candor test. Write for that reading order, not for a general CS audience. ## The load-bearing skeleton A canonical ICSE technique-plus-evaluation paper spends its ten pages (2027 format: 10 pages main text including all figures/tables/appendices, +2 pages references only) roughly like this: | Section | Pages | What reviewers extract from it | |---|---|---| | Introduction | 1.5 | The SE problem, who suffers it, the claim, the contributions list | | Background / motivating example | 1 | One concrete failing case the technique later fixes | | Approach | 2–2.5 | How it works, precisely enough to reimplement (verifiability) | | Study design | 1.5 | RQs, subjects, baselines, metrics, protocol — before any results | | Results, organized by RQ | 2.5 | One answer per RQ, stated then evidenced | | Discussion + implications | 0.5–1 | What researchers and practitioners should do differently
- The load-bearing skeleton
- Research questions as contract
- The threats-to-validity craft
- Motivation that survives the relevance criterion
- Calibrated claims
- The abstract, sentence by sentence
- Ten-page compression without desk-reject risk
- Output format
What does the icse-writing-style skill do?
Use when writing or revising an ICSE research-track paper, covering empirical-SE paper anatomy, research questions as the load-bearing structure, the threats-to-validity section the community expects, practitioner-grounded motivation, calibrated claims, and fitting a complete study into ten IEEE pages.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill icse-writing-style --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.