ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award FAQ
Are you a senior researcher in SE? You should nominate a great junior colleague for the ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher award.
Are you a junior researcher? You should be nominated for the SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award.
Yes, you, really! The ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award celebrates individuals who have made outstanding contributions to software engineering research within seven years of completing their most recent computer-related degree. The award is global, and open to both academic and industrial researchers.
This FAQ tackles common questions and concerns to help you move forward with confidence.
Q: How is the 7-year eligibility window calculated?
The seven-year period runs from the year of your most recent computer-related degree (bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral). For example, if you received your PhD at any point in 2018, you’re eligible to be nominated up to and including the 2025 nomination cycle (where the winners will receive awards in 2026).
Q: I’m outside the 7-year window. Can I still apply?
The eligibility period is regularly extended for extenuating circumstances, especially parental leave. A significant medical leave would also qualify, as well as considerations for the Covid-19 pandemic. The main consideration is that the situation must have caused a meaningful interruption to your career or research program. Simply ensure that those circumstances and their duration are clearly documented in the nomination statement. The committee reviews each case individually and will consider your specific situation fairly.
Q: I don’t have as many publications as X previous winner. Am I competitive?
There’s no magic number. The award recognizes “outstanding contributions,” which the committee evaluates based on impact (including on industry research or practice!), innovation, and significance rather than by counting papers. Publication counts in general, and amongst past winners, vary wildly based on research area, collaboration style, and type of contributions.
Q: What kinds of contributions actually count as “outstanding”? What should I highlight?
Looking at recent winners, outstanding contributions include but are not limited to:
- Methodological breakthroughs: New testing techniques, development tools, or ways of analyzing software
- Important empirical insights: Studies that change how we understand software engineering practices
- Useful tools or techniques: Software systems that researchers or practitioners adopt and use, or that other researchers are building on.
- Bridge-building work: Bringing software engineering insights to new domains or vice versa
Impact within industry is sometimes easiest to imagine, if you have it. But if you don’t, consider the CRA guidelines for evaluating Computer Scientists and Engineers for promotion and tenure: what are your three most important papers? What do they contribute?
The committees also consider and value contributions outside of research, including teaching, mentoring or service. The award is research focused, and so such contributions are not the main basis of the award. However, community-building work, especially when clearly connected to research impact, is still valued and considered.
Q: How does the committee assess impact across very different subfields?
We deliberately compose the committee so that it includes experts from diverse areas who can understand and explain the value of contributions within the context of each subfield. This means that impact can be (and is!) discussed in terms of significance within a subfield or across domains, instead of just by absolute numbers. You can see the committee membership on the award website.
Q: Do I need to work across multiple research areas? Do I need to only have made big contributions in a specific area?
Either works! Some past winners have gone deep in specific areas; others have made broader contributions across multiple domains. So long as there’s a clear narrative of your impact within or across whichever domains you work in, your work can be recognized.
Q: Should I nominate myself or ask someone else to do it?
Having a more-senior colleague handle the nomination can offer advantages:
- Senior colleagues typically have experience reading and writing letters of support and nomination statements.
- Senior colleagues can speak to your work’s significance from an outside perspective, and often with more confidence than you can bring to a discussion of your own work.
- The IEEE TCSE Rising Star Award, for which many people typically are nominated simultaneously, doesn’t allow self-nomination, so you can kill two birds with one stone.
- The package is submitted all together as a single PDF, and letter writers are often more comfortable sending a letter of support to a third party rather than to a nominee directly.
However, self-nomination is also fine and permitted, if that’s better for your circumstances. If you do self-nominate, write the nominating statement in the third person and focus on concrete achievements and measurable impact rather than subjective assessments.
A common paradigm is something in between: the nominee helps the nominator by identifying letter writers and providing starting material/bullet points to expand into a nomination statement.
Q: What’s the deal with the IEEE TCSE Rising Star award?
The awards have similar goals, and it is extremely common for individuals to be nominated for both simultaneously. The societies coordinate, so the deadlines are the same, and we ensure that an individual will only win one of the two. Additionally, if you’ve previously won the TCSE Rising Star award, you’re generally considered ineligible for the SIGSOFT Early Career Award (and vice versa).
However, there are some key practical differences to keep in mind, such as (1) SIGSOFT’s eligibility period is 7 years; TCSE’s is 6 years, and (2) SIGSOFT allows self-nomination, while TCSE doesn’t.
(Note that there may be other specific differences between the processes/packages; consult the awards nomination materials from both societies for more.)
Q: I’ve previously won an early-career recognition from a conference, like the Ric Holt Early Career Achievement Award from the Mining Software Repositories Conference. Am I still eligible for the ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award?
Yes! We aim to avoid double-awarding across computing societies, but conference-level awards are fine and will not count against you. In fact, it’s a great thing to highlight on your CV and in your nomination materials!
Q: How do I approach potential letter writers? I feel like I’m being burdensome.
Reach out now, and give them useful supporting materials, like your CV and a recent research statement, any draft nomination materials, and specific examples of contributions they might want to highlight. You may also remind potential letter writers that these letters need not be long; 300 words of core content suffices, though longer letters are certainly welcome.
Also, remember: writing recommendation letters is a part of academic life. Your senior colleagues write and read letters for promotion cases, job applications, and other career milestones all the time. They understand how important it is to support junior researchers. Most are happy to help junior researchers whose work they’re at least modestly familiar with, when asked thoughtfully and in advance.
Q: Anything else?
Don’t forget to remind your letter writers to include the required ethics statement in their letters.
Q: I don’t want to self-nominate. Who should I ask to help me?
It is very common for a nominator to be a senior researcher very “close” to the nominee. The most common choice is likely the nominee’s PhD or postdoc advisor. The second-most-common choice is a more senior member of the nominee’s academic department.
In the latter category: if you’re a junior faculty member or research scientist, you may have someone within your department who is either assigned to mentor you or other junior faculty, or someone who is more senior to you working in either SE or another adjacent field. These are typical choices. If you ask someone in your home department who isn’t as familiar with your discipline, it can be especially helpful for you to brief them on the context of your work and its impact, as well as contact information for your suggested letter writers. A quick meeting to cover these bases is normal and often very useful.
All that said: If you have a more “distant” senior mentor in the field who’s willing to do it, that’s great, and go for it; it’s always nice to get arms-length perspectives. But that’s not at all the common case, and those more “distant” mentors are often great people to ask for letters of support.
Q: What about letter writers?
Senior researchers who can speak to impact in a field generally are a good choice. This can include collaborators, but others who are arms-length are also great and can provide useful perspective. You almost certainly have more options than you think you do; consider other researchers you’ve interacted with via committees or at conferences, workshops, or other research-oriented meetings. Senior colleagues in your department, especially those adjacent to or in Software Engineering, can either serve as letter writers, or may have suggestions on who else you might ask, for when you’re brainstorming.
Q: What are the key deadlines I need to know about?
The process happens in two stages:
- Intent to nominate (first deadline): Just basic information about the nominee and nominator. This is very simple, but please don’t miss it; it is required.
- Complete nomination package (second deadline, two weeks later): All nomination materials in one PDF
Check the main SIGSOFT Awards page for this year’s specific dates and a link to the submission portal.
Q: When should I apply within my 7 year window? And what if things don’t work out this time?
Applying in your first or second year post-degree is less likely to be successful, but waiting until the very end of your eligibility isn’t necessary, either. Importantly, if your nomination isn’t selected, you can reuse your nomination materials for up to two more years either with or without changes. That means the amount of work to try again is amortized.
Q: But I won’t win! Should I bother?
Yes!
Someone wins every year. Why not you, or your great colleague down the hall? A nomination package does take some effort to put together, but it’s not intended to be prohibitively onerous.
The field benefits when we highlight the great work being done by junior researchers. You should go for it.
For more information about all ACM SIGSOFT awards, including the timeline, eligibility criteria, and links to award-specific information and the nomination portal, visit the SIGSOFT awards overview page.
Claire Le Goues
SIGSOFT Award Chair
Professor, Associate Dept Head for Faculty, S3D/SCS/CMU
