ICSME Supplementary

Use this when assembling ICSME supplementary material. The governing rule is simple and strict: the paper must be judgeable from the reviewed pages alone. The artifact and any appendix support the paper; they do not hold the argument. Reviewers read the artifact at their discretion, so anything the decision depends on lives in the 10 pages — and there is no revision round to move it in later.

What goes where

If a reviewer would need to open the artifact to know whether to accept, the paper is mis-partitioned — move that evidence into the body.

The 10-page discipline (figures and appendices count)

ICSME's IEEEtran two-column budget (2026: 10 pages including figures, tables, and appendices, plus 2 reference-only pages) is tighter than FSE's single-column allowance. Consequences:

• Keep the full threats-to-validity treatment and the primary result tables in the body — they are decision-critical and cannot be delegated to the artifact.
• Long per-subject breakdowns, the full mining pipeline diagram, and additional RQ variants go to the artifact with explicit forward references.
• In-paper appendices count against the 10 pages — do not use an appendix to smuggle back space the two-column limit denied you.
• Do not use the artifact to smuggle in a result that would not fit; an argument that only closes with material outside the reviewed pages reads as unreviewable.

Double-anonymous supplementary rules

[No identity]   no authors, affiliations, acknowledgements, grants, cluster paths, repo owners, or
                your own org's project as a named subject anywhere in the archive or appendix
[Anonymized links] the data-availability link points at an anonymizing host, not a personal repo
[Clean archive]  no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or large irrelevant corpora dumps
[Opens clean]    verify the archive unzips and the README orients a reader in one minute on a
                fresh machine

Appendix architecture (within the budget)

• Order appendix sections to mirror the RQ order; reviewers navigate by RQ, not page number.
• Keep each appendix section referenced from the body at least once — orphaned material is invisible under discretionary review.
• Confirm on the current call whether any online appendix is permitted separately from the 10 pages; historically ICSME counts in-paper appendices against the limit and expects the rest in the artifact.

Vignette: splitting a mining + interview paper

A paper mining commit history plus interviewing maintainers: the body keeps the RQs, the study design, the headline quantitative evolution results with effect sizes, the key qualitative themes, and a threats subsection; the artifact holds the mining scripts with pinned SHAs, the extracted corpus, the full codebook with inter-rater agreement, the interview protocol, and the analysis notebooks. Nothing decision-critical lives only in the artifact, because artifact inspection is discretionary and the reviewers judge from the 10 pages.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page budget] body within 10 pages (figures+appendices counted)? refs within 2? yes/no
[Anonymity] archive clean of identity + metadata + own-org subjects? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the artifact>